Passion for the job is top ingredient for Eastern State Hospital occupational therapists
by Rob Johnson, DSHS Behavioral Health Administration
Expect a 30-minute stream of excited commentary when the topic of occupational therapy is brought up to Joy Gilbert.
Her passion for the job is so immense it’s contagious. And with April being National Occupational Therapy Month, she was thrilled to discuss the work of the occupational therapy staff who serve patients of Eastern State Hospital.
“I really love what I do,” said Gilbert, a licensed and registered occupational therapist since 1988 who has worked at Eastern since 2019. “I’ve worked in many different parts of the profession and mental health is the place that I love the most. I really feel lucky to work at Eastern State Hospital because occupational therapy is really valued by the treatment teams.”
Tracy Strong, a certified occupational therapy assistant who has worked at Eastern since 1996, shares the same enthusiasm for their, well, occupation.
“I love my job,” she said. “I love working at Eastern State Hospital, but most of all my passion is working with people who have mental illness. If I can be here another 25 years, I will be.”
One thing to know about occupational therapy: It’s about much more than helping people recover from injury to return to work or get a job. The primary goal of occupational therapy is to support and enable each person’s health and participation in life through their engagement in occupation.
“We like to help people live life to the fullest,” Gilbert said. “We take people where they’re at and meet them in areas where they can be successful. Occupation really is the work of life.”
Gilbert and Strong were quick to point out that it’s common for people to think that occupational therapy is about helping people get a job, but occupational therapy as a profession began more than a century ago with a focus on helping psychiatric patients. After World War I, occupational therapists worked with veterans who suffered physical and mental injuries that made it difficult to return to life as it was at home.
“In the 1800s and early 1900s it was a commonly held belief that people who had mental illness needed to be removed from society,” Gilbert said. “But there was a movement that if people were treated more humanely and given things to do they would be better off. There are things that we can modify to maximize your life. We are really focused on maximizing function for someone with mental illness or physical injury. Our scope of practice is pretty wide.”
Occupational therapy at Eastern has expanded in recent years to provide more active treatment to forensic patients. Strong works with not guilty by reason of insanity patients and is working with her supervisor and the occupational therapy team to create a robust program for Eastern’s forensic population.
Being new to the NGRI unit, Strong is learning about the patients and how to connect with them to understand their needs.
“They have incredible stories and tragic stories, and to have them share those stories with me has been inspiring,” she said. “I am learning about their pasts and what their recovery can bring to their future roles. I look forward to providing interventions to help them reach their optimal level of functioning when they discharge.”
As an occupational therapist, Gilbert does both patient evaluation and treatment. Her aim is to understand a patient’s goals and motivation, and create a path to attainability — although success is not necessarily dependent upon the patient reaching their ultimate goal.
“If you’re hospitalized with acute mental illness, all the roles they find meaningful to life they are deprived of,” she said. “We work to establish gaining new roles or reaching new goals until they are ready to be discharged. We take a lofty goal and find the layers and steps to fit within that motivation.
“I like to say we’re the MacGyvers of health care because we can jimmy rig something out of nothing.”
Working at Eastern has given Strong unlimited potential to grow as a person and as a professional because of the patients and because occupational therapy crosses paths with so many other disciplines at the hospital.
“Being part of a dynamic interdisciplinary team, working together, seeing where this person started and watching their progression in their recovery is an amazing experience,” she said.
Strong has another outlet to share her zeal for occupational therapy. She teaches courses at Spokane Falls Community College and is a guest lecturer at Eastern Washington University. And she makes a point to help her students understand that occupational therapy plays an important role in working with persons who have a mental illness despite the relative low number of mental health-related positions in the field.
“I want to give these students a new understanding of what is mental illness and what it’s like to work with someone who has a mental illness,” Strong said. “If we can start teaching these students how to see things differently that is huge because you will always encounter mental illness in your career, even if you’re not working at a psychiatric hospital.
“It is important to me to educate and decrease the stigma of mental illness.”
Gaining such an understanding might be the spark that fuels a future Eastern occupational therapist who shares the same joy for the profession.
“I have a real passion for what I do,” Gilbert said. “In OT we ask, ‘What matters to you, not, what is the matter with you.’”