February, leap-year day and all, is past, and March is here.
And after a cold snap, the weather is headed back to where it was
on my arrival a week ago: unseasonably warm and bright outside.

There is a rhythm in the patient schedule:
all the individual treatments are on weekdays.
Weekends no-one sees a psychiatrist or therapist except when urgent.
As to the peer-driven group activities,
every weekday does have a community meeting;
but for in-patients, both weekend days have group meetings
that are separate from the community meetings.
So, when the professionals disappear from the weekend routine,
the peer groups (with nursing staff) pick up the slack.

This coming week, my schedule will not be bursting with interviews, introductions, and admission assessments as last week's schedule was.
Along with weekday treatment and appointments, my schedule will have time
for the community meetings that I could not go to last week (except for one or two).
Have to introduce more interactions with the other patients into life.

And so, slowly getting acquainted with more individuals.
Young adult women do predominate the patient population, some of them really young adults still close to their parents.
It is sobering to discover how urgently they needed treatment when they got here.
Now becoming apparent that this is not the easiest gig for men.
Those men patients who are more extroverted and gregarious have the advantage here.
I have now got used to the silent introverted men who seem quietly resigned to
the raised voices of the younger women patients.
The men's presence is far from threatening; I like having them around.

Can't say enough good things about the nurses and their fellow 'mental health workers' at the residence. More than one patient has expressed how nurturing they are.
So much so that I don't feel alone or isolated here.

The patients who obviously are most conflicted and struggling
are the ones separated from loved ones,
which of course is not the case with me.
Those patients who are parents of children feel a constant pull.
Some of these isolate from the other patients because of this.

One outstanding feature of this treatment center, which
will take time to understand on my part, is
the role of the social workers in family therapy
and as the contacts to the relationships outside.
For some of the patients,
the relationship with their assigned social worker is a lifeline.
They depend enormously on their work with the social worker
in order to progress.
I've only met mine once, and as my emotions were running high at the time,
there was only so much work we could get done at our first consult.
So that remains to develop and to be seen.

One last detail: the cooking is wonderful.
Died-and-gone-to-heaven wonderful.
Three delicious square meals a day. It's an enormous blessing.