Meghan, Correctional Manager

At some point, the things that we see and the things that we're exposed to make us not okay. And it's okay to reach out for help.

Hi, I'm Megan, and I'm a Correctional Manager at the Regional Psychiatric center. We basically oversee the entire operations of the institution, scheduling all of our correctional officers, training, ensuring that all of our NTS is completed, deployments in and out. The training that I've been able to do, either through CSC or on my own, has really been great too. So we have offenders of all different security levels come from all over the country that have mental health concerns.

I like it because every day is different. Like I'm part of the crisis negotiating team as well. I really enjoy doing that. The crisis negotiation team is one of our specialized teams that we have here in the institution. We're also unique in the fact that we have not only do we have a male emergency response team, we also have a female emergency response team.

So the crisis negotiator team works in tandem with both of those teams to deal with institutional emergencies. We have dealt with hostages. We've dealt with noncompliant offenders. We're there for different reasons sometimes. Right. So if even if we decide to go tactical, we're there to gather information for our ERT team. Sometimes we're there to buy time. We never look at it and say, we were never not successful in a deployment.

They've all been successful. At some point the things that we see and the things that we're exposed to make us not okay. And it's okay to reach out for help. I'm also a member of our EAP team. I think just having more people being open and honest about their experiences and where to find help and that, you know, it's not a sign of weakness.

This is just it happens. We’re people too, some of us see some things that people will never, ever see. It's a work in progress. It's something that you have to continually be mindful about.