I have been looking forward to this conversation for a very long time. I spent time on Stephen’s farm in Ottawa a number of years back during a time in my life when very little made sense other than a trip to a faraway place only to return from whence I came. I have thought about my time at the Orphan Wisdom School a great deal and many happenings have filled the space between this interview and that experience. I no longer work for the fire department and have shifted my efforts to social work. Therapy. One of the most recurrent treatments on the ambulance was “supportive care.” In the field, this was a fancy word for “hand-holding.” These were usually the elderly nursing home patients with abnormal bloodwork or someone with an illness that required little more than a ride to the hospital. These were often my favorite calls.
I remember an old woman telling me how the Nazis invaded her town in Holland when she was 13. She went on to talk about her brother and how he survived the camps after being sent there for smuggling Jews into England with fake passports. Supportive Care was likely the place where my desire to pursue talk therapy found its roots. This is where the thank you cards came from. Not from our IV skills or our medical jargon. From the warmness shared from one human being to another. Heart-based cognition as I believe it is called.
So I went to the school of social work to begin my studies. As my time at university progressed, I began to notice something: many members of the faculty and social workers in the field seemed interested less in that type of heart-based cognition and more into the management of people and more specifically the customer service business of getting people back in for more therapy. Moreover, much of the material sought to normalize experiences of burnout, narcissism, greed, and ego.
These critiques are from a perspective that is inherently subjective. I’m in the school, opening a practice, and have circled the sun enough times where my past experiences do not dictate my present, but they do inform it. This smelled like good old-fashioned bullshit. And who can afford therapy? People with money. Or a good EAP (Employee Assistance Provider). Who has those? Largely government workers. I had a great EAP with the fire department and was able to see my therapist 12 times a year. For most of the working class and poor, this is something other people do.
Many of my concerns and critiques weren’t going anywhere. And I’m not intent on leaving social work before I have entered it. So I reached out to Stephen. Before heading up Canada’s largest palliative care unit, he was a practicing therapist, seeing clients as I will soon be. And so often in my life I can look to the experience and words of older people who have been in my life, and in my case mostly older men. I could identify with them in ways that felt as though I was being spoken to from the future, someone to help ground me in where I was in my own life.
Stephen shared with me his own experiences in social work. He called it the redemption business. I believe that may be more fitting. I’m so grateful to him and his wife Nathalie for arranging and sitting down for this interview. It has been some time since I have released a podcast. I have written a great deal, and I hope that you’ll look in to that work as well. For now, I hope this interview with Stephen leaves you as it did me, ever curious about this life and the people we meet. Salud.
The Future of Social Work with Stephen Jenkinson