COVID-19
March 13th, 2020, was the official start of the pandemic for me, Kristina Murphy. The schools in California had closed; my clients had mostly shut their doors. Barricading the disease with Lysol and hand sanitizer; refusing all outside person entry into their homes. What we didn't know was that the worst was yet to come: death tolls reaching 211,761 deaths, 7,407,970 confirmed cases, and a grandmother in lockdown who couldn't understand why we couldn't see her- fuck dementia. The weeks turned into months that have since dragged on into almost a whole year.
Through an iPhone screen, I altered behaviors, supported supervisees, and watched the world unravel. Many clients, myself, and the world alike manifested new behaviors, regressed in life skills, or drove their parents to new coping skills. I saw a spike in depression, anxiety, and several unmaskings of mental illness yet unaddressed in all this. The brutal truth, there was nothing I could do about these silent invaders.
One little girl in the grips of depression far too severe for someone so young. I was begging an already overwhelmed mother to take her to see a psychologist.
My realm was objective, measurable, and recordable, to top it off, untreatable by California insurance.
If you learn anything about me, nothing isn't an option. Rather than continue to watch diagnosis be ignored in light of their autism diagnosis, I dug. I discovered that becoming the BCBA that I had spent my entire master's degree pursuing had become obsolete. If all I could do was modify a behavior while ignoring the suffering of the whole person, "What type of mental health professional did that make me?"
An incomplete one.
I was finding the pathway out of the frustrating limitations of Applied Behavioral Analysis; Licensed Psychologist. Out went the application, now the waiting. The waiting for more, to do better, to change the odds for those who couldn't do it for themselves.
Regardless of whether I get into this program, I'll try again. That's what you do when people need you. You keep going.