Shane Brewer

My career has always been centered around helping people who are in crisis. I’ve worked in prisons, community probation, with adults, and with young people. For me, it’s all part of the same story. When people are in crisis, when they are unpredictable and a potential danger to themselves or others, I’ll try and be the help they need.

How did I get into it? To be honest, a lot of my childhood was difficult and when you’ve lived it, you know how someone’s environment and circumstances can impact their mental health and the decisions that they make. You can listen, you can have a conversation and help those people understand it too. That’s what I think my job and my skills are – listening, talking, helping people to take a step back, understand their behaviors, and start to de-escalate.

At Comprehensive Healthcare, my focus is on young people. I find it so rewarding because I always get the sense that this is a fork in the road for them. The potential for change at their stage of life feels significant. If I can help them, I know I can make a big difference to their future, maybe change their whole life for the better.

It’s the kind of work where you can’t expect wins every day. But here, I’ve got a really good team around me, and we all check in on each other. When you’re dealing with crises in the community, one after the other, you can start to become numb about how you feel. That rarely happens to me here. People stay close to each other, we talk a lot, and we work together. It’s a supportive, collaborative atmosphere.

It helps me that Washington State has lots of places to get away from it all as well. I love to fly fish and that’s one of the main reasons I chose to relocate here from California, other than the obvious, which is my amazing wife! I love a weekend being up in the mountains, out on the river, lost in my thoughts, waiting for next catch… It’s just what I need to come back to work feeling refreshed and recharged. 

Fishing helps me appreciate that the best things in life can take time and you need patience. In this job, you can’t always help people right away. So, when those wins come around, they really mean a lot. We’ve done some work with a local crisis center for girls. The girls who were referred there were all at their lowest point, no support from family, nowhere else to turn. Just the other day, one of the clients Ive worked with called me to say how well she was doing. Simple as that, but it’s the best feeling in the world.

It’s the fork in the road again, right? Kids on the road to prison, on the road to drug addiction, the people who’ve lost hope and society is ready to throw them away. Then you get a call to say, ‘I’m here and I’m doing alright’. That moment is what I’m after. That’s all it takes. All they need from me is the patience to help them get there.

If you would like to see the latest career opportunities with Comprehensive Healthcare, whether you have healthcare experience or not, click here