Pamela Garfield-Jaeger

I'm going to look at all the different influences and not just...

pigeonhole what the DSM says or what I'm supposed to think and just send them on this pathway, this one size fits all pathway that our profession seems to be doing.

Pamela, that's just the DSM.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, just the masks that in alone.

So this was one of my big things when I was still working in a center.

They were having they were masking people with severe mental health issues.

I was in IOP, PHP, you know, group therapy with people who had just come off from being hospitalized.

Some of them had pretty severe mental health disorders, you know.

psychotic symptoms bipolar you know mania real symptoms real severe paranoia that kind of thing and we're masking them yeah we all know at this point that the masks don't work they were doing it because the mandate was in california they're just following orders but nobody was even questioning it nobody was speaking up about it nobody was saying how this is harmful for

It's harmful for us all, but in particular with this population and what the harms were, they were just going along to get along.

They didn't even think it was a problem.

It was just status quo.

And that to me was so demoralizing to see my colleagues not think that.

How this is so bad for people.

I mean, trauma, just to be able to breathe.

If you're dealing with not being able to see people's faces, it's hard enough for us who have regular everyday aren't just coming out of a hospitalization to not see people's faces, not be able to see smiles, not be able to see.

expressions than people who are struggling socially.

To me, it blew my mind.