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Commentary on
“Leading the Witness”

Megan Wildhood

“Leading the Witness” is based on my real experience with a client at the crisis center I was working at during the time in my life when I thought being a social worker would finally get God to love me. Horrible theology aside, I did not love the work of direct services in a city seizing with an unmitigated housing crisis, so I ultimately did not stay in the field of social work. But I did love the client that Jane Tagen in “Leading the Witness” is based on. I did not love the choices what’s left of our social safety net leaves those who find themselves without family, friends, or faculties—involuntary commitment or discharge (back) to the streets.

But I did love trying to forge a connection with “Jane” and advocating for her well-being among my coworkers and other workers in the nexus of health care, social services, the mental health industry, and the law. I did not love having to write a declaration of incompetence/grave disability in order to get her committed so as to avoid being booted back onto the streets where I couldn’t imagine she’d survive more than a day. That choice haunted me for more than a year—and perhaps “Leading the Witness” is evidence that it still does.

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Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

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