Waiting


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

This is the season for waiting. It is springtime in New England and the promise of green is delayed by another cold-snap, another dose of a winter mix that pits shovel against sunshine in the race to clear the driveway. In the hospital, patients are waiting as always for the voices to go away, for a new medicine that doesn't make them so sleepy or jittery or fill in the blank with almost any uncomfortable sensation you can imagine. They are waiting for the clinical team to increase their privileges, waiting for a chance to spend time off the locked unit, time to walk around the grounds and to go shopping in town. Ultimately, they are waiting to go home.

For those who have been here for years or, in some cases, decades, going home means finding a home. This is usually done in a stepwise fashion through the system of half-way houses and supportive living arrangements that gradually reintroduce people to community living. The economics of treatment and rehabilitation, however, have always been an exercise in finding and maintaining the right balance of hospital and outpatient resources. In the past, our patients waited for community residences that didn't exist. Next, they waited for inpatient services to prepare them for discharge and for half-way houses that didn't trade quality of care for attractive profit margins. Now, those who are still with us need to wait for even more sophisticated services to address the more complex combinations of psychiatric, medical and social needs that have kept them here.

Waiting is not easy. Just ask Violet (not her real name) and she will tell you what she recently told members of her treatment team at her monthly progress review. "It's a sad day when you have to call a mental hospital your home." In her nearly 10 years in the hospital, Violet has made significant progress learning to control her extreme mood swings and aggressive behavior. She is still easily frustrated and sometimes verbally abusive, but what keeps her in the hospital now is her deteriorating health and her need for a community residence that provides both behavioral supervision and on-site medical care. We are told that help is on the way for patients like Violet and we pass on the message with as much conviction and hope as we can muster. In the meantime, we do what we can to help our patients make the best of their waiting time.

Waiting is an art. This is true whether you are a patient in a hospital, an applicant for a psychology internship or a high school senior trying to imagine yourself in college. Every year, the rhythms of our internship program bring stories and experiences of the stress involved in waiting. Applicants tell us of turning on the computer on Match Day and waiting for their fate to appear on the screen. Though the stakes are different, training staff share apprehensions about filling all of their positions and about whether the matches made by the big computer will be matches made in heaven or elsewhere.

This is also the month when prospective college students commit to one of the schools that recently ended their long wait for an answer with the coveted acceptance letter. Technology has changed the way the waiting game is played since my own college days. In addition to having the option to apply for an early decision, students can now use the Internet to get regular updates from colleges on the status of their applications and to share experiences with other applicants to the same schools. It is still true that a big envelope from a college carries an acceptance letter, while a small or thin envelope contains a very eloquent and sensitive rejection. This cuts down the waiting period by the amount of time it takes to open a letter and, so there can be no doubt whatsoever, one college that I know of emblazons the phrase, "Official Fat Envelope," on the bulging package. There are still waiting lists but now they are called "wait lists." Perhaps this is a special honor given to students who are judged to be unusually good waiters. I suggested this to my son but he isn't buying it.

Since waiting is a fact of life, we might as well find ways to wait painlessly. Here are a few suggestions: bring a book, bring an I-Pod (technology makes waiting easier by making our distractions more portable), mentally compose the first line of the novel you always wanted to write, generate a list of prime numbers, imagine you are a character in a movie and do whatever the soundtrack suggests. The real trick is to pretend you are not waiting by becoming so involved in whatever it is you are doing that you forget what you are waiting for. While I was waiting for an example of this strategy to occur to me, the telephone rang. It was our plumber, Mike, and he asked, "Are you still waiting for me to fix the bathroom faucet?" As a matter of fact, we are, although I had almost completely forgotten that we had a bathroom faucet, much less that it cracked in a mid-winter freeze. You get used to one less sink in the house. Life goes on and you make do.

Waiting (May 2007 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Waiting
(May 2007 Issue)