IT'S FICTION, BUT IT'S NOT (OR...JUST THE FACTS MA'M)

I have always been interested in writing. I thought that someday I might write the definitive novel about what it was like to work in a psych hospital on the front lines. I spent most, check that, almost all of my adult life doing just that. But as time marches on, my other "civilian" jobs that followed are rapidly catching up. Time hasn't faded the memories, and my attempts to push it into a black hole of substance abuse didn't work. Time has allowed me to temper the glorification of what we did. I still believe we did great works and helped lots of people, but in between we did some really questionable things in the name of crisis intervention. For a variety of reasons, these stories must be presented as fiction.
The most important is to protect the confidentiality of the patients involved. Second after that is the way the more colorful incidents were documented. And that would be via incident reports...dragnet style, facts only (and some strategically left out) documents of events that, if the whole story were told, could have landed some otherwise good folks in some really hot fucking water.
During my time on the crisis intervention team and my tenure in the community programs, I was the go to guy for incident reports. Kind of like a faker of classic art. On the face of it, it was a Picasso, but if you looked at it long enough with a certain eye, small holes would appear. Take, for example a post I took down the other day called "Fireants". It was a true story, presented as fiction, and while I liked it when I posted it, the next day I looked at it in a different light. There was never an incident report generated about the events, but had there been there would have surely been a passage that would go something like this :" Patient became combative and was restrained briefly on the ground in front of his unit. Staff involved were able to intervene verbally and continue a controlled escort to a security room in less than five minutes. Patient was minimally able to process his behavior/actions with staff involved and understood the circumstances surrounding his seclusion. "
Pretty cut and dry eh? Now lets pretend the patient was interviewed..." I was pissed off about a phone call I had with my dad, I transferred my anger ( therapists teach them cute little bullshit gems like this, BTW) onto Rob and Ben ( not his real name) and began to struggle, they threw me chest first into a fireant mound and held me there, menacing me until I agreed to walk to the security room."
See what I mean?
At the cordite fest, I was talking about my attempts at writing short stories and, explaining why I took "fireants" down, said something along the lines of what would cause a person to do something like that to another human being? I mean sure, it was a stressfull job, and while it made perfect sense at the time and achieved the goal, today it seems extreme.
The only comment I remember was "yeah, Rob, that's pretty fucking extreme".
I spent so much time writing propaganda that I could have foregone all the drinking and drugs, I sublimated my feelings ( shit works both ways...we learned what to say as well) through the incident reports and could of left it at that, but partying was fun and kept the dogs at bay in the moment. It allowed me to keep going back to what was, for the most part, a war zone. And with the passage of time I can see how I and my team mates contributed to that mindset and how we learned to deny it.
Ann helped me see how detached I am from the reality of those days...outwardly anyway.
The battle rages on in my head, and in my heart. And someday I will write it down, like it really happened.