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silveradept[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
The public library is one of the few places in the body civic that does not expect a person to spend money to have the right to be in the space, and also does not expect a parson to only stay for a limited amount of time of the open hours. We open in the morning and often close fairly late at night. So long as the person in the library is doing something that is within the boundaries of the behavior guidelines, they can stay.
A consequence of this is that the library can draw two general crowds who have nowhere else to go during the day - minors (sometimes supervised) and people who do not have a fixed residence. The minors are usually easy enough to keep within the boundaries of the behavior guidelines. They will sometimes get shirty with you or start behaving in petty prankish ways because minors have a significant amount of energy and putting them into a small space will cause them to behave like a compressed gas. But minors, unless they are possessed of a particularly malicious bent, are not going to require special handling to make sure they stay within the rules of behavior.
This is not always true for those without fixed residence. There are many people who have lost their houses or apartments because of mental health issues or drug usage that they cannot afford to have treated, or they have developed new issues from being unhoused, whether from the stress or a drug related issue. Many shelters are only open during certain times of the day and require that everyone who stayed there leave and then line up later in the day to see if they can again get a bed for the night. Housing assistance programs often are located in hard-to-reach places, and may have requirements that someone can't meet. So, often times someone needs a place to be during the day, and the public library provides that for a person. Most days, everything is fine. There are days, however, where a person is in the library and has a physical or mental episode, and there aren't any trained professionals around to help with the situation.
It used to be, at least in the world of people comfortably surrounded by their privilege, that you could be reasonably assured that calling the police would mean the matter would be handled professionally and with a minimum of worry, such that a person having an episode would get the help they needed. The more we have seen of how police act, though, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods, that idea was equally likely to have been a convenient fiction rather than a fact. The sad truth is that library staff are often the first and only people who are acting in a situation to try and defuse it before it gets worse. Most of us are untrained in this to any degree at all, and so we have the possibility of making it worse ourselves.
So, in much the same way that libraries have become unofficial experts in navigating the systems of social assistance by having to help people do it so often, librarians are voluntarily adding on training for themselves in recognizing and handling situations that require mental health first aid, because they get a population of people that need it and having can be the difference between catching something and possibly being able to ward it off and having a patron have to take their chances on the police roulette wheel. Library school, as you might guess, did not prepare us for this at all. We could legitimately claim that this isn't part of our job description, but that would be refusing to acknowledge the reality of the world going on around us, and libraries have already spent enough time doing that to last for the rest of human existence. There are always things that require actual experience working in a library before they make sense and stick, but it seems like schools are content to stick to the idea situation to explain and teach and give practice, and then let the directed fieldwork impart the lesson that nothing in actual library practice will look like how you learned it in library school. Which is an essential lesson to get, but one that should be worked into the curriculum more than it is. Perhaps the inclusion of some required cognate courses from other schools about some of the likely issues a librarian will encounter could help to get this across.
The public library is one of the few places in the body civic that does not expect a person to spend money to have the right to be in the space, and also does not expect a parson to only stay for a limited amount of time of the open hours. We open in the morning and often close fairly late at night. So long as the person in the library is doing something that is within the boundaries of the behavior guidelines, they can stay.
A consequence of this is that the library can draw two general crowds who have nowhere else to go during the day - minors (sometimes supervised) and people who do not have a fixed residence. The minors are usually easy enough to keep within the boundaries of the behavior guidelines. They will sometimes get shirty with you or start behaving in petty prankish ways because minors have a significant amount of energy and putting them into a small space will cause them to behave like a compressed gas. But minors, unless they are possessed of a particularly malicious bent, are not going to require special handling to make sure they stay within the rules of behavior.
This is not always true for those without fixed residence. There are many people who have lost their houses or apartments because of mental health issues or drug usage that they cannot afford to have treated, or they have developed new issues from being unhoused, whether from the stress or a drug related issue. Many shelters are only open during certain times of the day and require that everyone who stayed there leave and then line up later in the day to see if they can again get a bed for the night. Housing assistance programs often are located in hard-to-reach places, and may have requirements that someone can't meet. So, often times someone needs a place to be during the day, and the public library provides that for a person. Most days, everything is fine. There are days, however, where a person is in the library and has a physical or mental episode, and there aren't any trained professionals around to help with the situation.
It used to be, at least in the world of people comfortably surrounded by their privilege, that you could be reasonably assured that calling the police would mean the matter would be handled professionally and with a minimum of worry, such that a person having an episode would get the help they needed. The more we have seen of how police act, though, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods, that idea was equally likely to have been a convenient fiction rather than a fact. The sad truth is that library staff are often the first and only people who are acting in a situation to try and defuse it before it gets worse. Most of us are untrained in this to any degree at all, and so we have the possibility of making it worse ourselves.
So, in much the same way that libraries have become unofficial experts in navigating the systems of social assistance by having to help people do it so often, librarians are voluntarily adding on training for themselves in recognizing and handling situations that require mental health first aid, because they get a population of people that need it and having can be the difference between catching something and possibly being able to ward it off and having a patron have to take their chances on the police roulette wheel. Library school, as you might guess, did not prepare us for this at all. We could legitimately claim that this isn't part of our job description, but that would be refusing to acknowledge the reality of the world going on around us, and libraries have already spent enough time doing that to last for the rest of human existence. There are always things that require actual experience working in a library before they make sense and stick, but it seems like schools are content to stick to the idea situation to explain and teach and give practice, and then let the directed fieldwork impart the lesson that nothing in actual library practice will look like how you learned it in library school. Which is an essential lesson to get, but one that should be worked into the curriculum more than it is. Perhaps the inclusion of some required cognate courses from other schools about some of the likely issues a librarian will encounter could help to get this across.
