What is JCAHO?

"The state is here!" cried a doctor from her car as she pulled into the parking lot. My supervisor, walking with me into the hospital, stopped abruptly and slowly covered her hand over her mouth.
"You can't be here" She said as she looked at me.

Of course, I had a heads up for a few weeks, knowing that Jchao (pronounced "JAYCO"), whoever that was, was going to make a surprise visit to review the hospital, and all interns (that's me) were to be sent home. It made sense, I am technically a "volunteer" since I opted not to do my dance therapy internship through my graduate school, but rather for the hours and experience towards my hopeful dance therapy registration in the future, and I don't have formal training. Yet.

So I Googled "Jayco" when I got home and found this blog post, written by the CEO of a Boston hospital, stating why Jcaho, The Joint Commission, is important and necessary. Here is Jcaho's website on hospital standards, and Wikipedia's explanation of who they are and why they're so important for our health and wellbeing.

Good luck, hospital!

Interesting Reading for my Internship

“Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is.”

This quote serves me as a sort of mantra during the somewhat uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory of working with hospitalized mentally ill patients, who are overwhelmingly medicated on major antidepressants and antipsychotics. But how do I do dance therapy with a heavily medicated patient, or a group of heavily medicated patients? Will the drugs prevent or slow any therapeutic progress in the expressive arts? Are the "numbed" patients able to feel deeply, able to express themselves artistically?

At the library yesterday, I picked up Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, (2008)by Charles Barber. Here is a quote from it:

"In our particularly American zeal for simple explanations, quick fixes, and overwhelming the enemy with technology, we've too quickly lost sight of the centrality of social and environmental factors. And despite undeniable progress in the pharmacological realm, the enduring truth is that the human factor, and the human approach, remains critical to healing."

For more interesting reading, here's a link to another article about the perceptions of the mentally ill, printed in the Utne Reader.