So why do all health care professionals make such inappropriate jokes, are so sarcastic, and such incredible cynics?

Well, we're not all like that. But a lot of us are. Here's the thing, whether you work as an outpatient mental health therapist, a dentist, a hospital worker, at a community medical clinic, or anywhere else you deal with bad things all the time. My job, which is now half as a regular outpatient therapist and half as an intensive outpatient therapist involves hearing about suicide, homicide, illegal activity, trauma, victimization, abuse. All of the things people try to avoid or avoid talking or thinking about if they experience them. For me, that means 8+ hours a day, some days up to 15 hours, of hearing the worst things that can happen to people.

It's my job to help people overcome these problems. To do this over the long term, that involves helping people realize they can overcome those problems without me or any other mental health therapist. This takes time. For some issues, a LOT of time. And in that time there will be a lot of failures, setbacks, and frustration. In the process of helping someone I'll feel inadequate, confused, stuck, angry, sad, unprofessional, hopeless. It's all because, to do my work, I need to be in the mindset of my clients and many of them have entirely given up. I also need to care about them. I need to want them to succeed. Which makes it even more frustrating when things go wrong.

I'm not alone in this. Every health care professional will feel similar. What's worse is that there's nothing we can really do about it besides continue to work with the client and think about new ways to improve their lives. We don't have an avenue to vent in an immediate way. We don't have quick fixes to move past what's bothering us. Like our client's we can feel all these emotions and have no place to put them.

Well how does this explain sarcasm, cynicism, and inappropriate jokes?

That sarcasm, cynicism, inappropriate jokes, and just bitching overall is our outlet for venting. It might be inappropriate and we'd never do it in front of clients or non-health care people. But with health care people, professionals can become pretty unprofessional. We can say very mean things about ourselves, our clients, our profession, the world. And we get very raw and mean and people would be very upset with us if they heard it.

So you're assholes?

Well, maybe. Here's the other thing, if we didn't care we wouldn't get so frustrated. It's like how frustrated people get at their family members. People can yell about how they don't care about their family members but if they really didn't care they wouldn't yell about it. They wouldn't mention them because they wouldn't ever cross their minds because you don't consider the things you don't care about. For example, I don't care about Bjork. So I never think about Bjork (besides just now that is). So in a vacuum, we sound like assholes. But taking into account why we're being such assholes I don't think we're actually assholes. We're frustrated and we need to vent and we'd rather laugh about what we're venting about then just get pissed. Because no matter how much we bitch the situation doesn't change. So may as well laugh about it right?

It sounds like you all need to see therapist and take your own advice and whatnot and so on and etc.

Yeah yeah. Here's the last thing, health care professionals are not perfect. No matter what we say or how we act. We all fuck up. I say dumb shit constantly. At times I'm an idiot. I just made a thread about how my own saliva kind of freaks me out. I can be unreasonable and rude. All the bad things a person can be a health care professional can be. That's because we're human. We do our best, we know how to do our job, and we try our best to live our personal lives as well as we can. So if you hear a therapist or another health care professional complaining or seeming like a piece of shit remember that we are trying our best and we will at one point or another, professionally or personally, fuck up. Try not to hold it against us.