Hey everybody. Find this place okay? Good. Pull up a seat, grab a sandwich, I've got some cold ones in the esky there.
Hmm? Nah, go for it. Drink if you want, I personally have a full flask with me most days. The higher ups don't care. I mean, they do, and they'll have you shot if you show up for work sozzled, but just for the orientation? No one gives a shit. And you're gonna need it, trust me.
So without further ado – welcome to the Containment Psychiatry Orientation. You're all here because you're going to be moving on from handing pills out to cubicle jockeys and giving rum-soaked MTF agents a shoulder to cry on, to the wild world of providing psychiatric care to sapient humanoid SCP objects. To weird people in prison fatigues. Treating skips is very a different experience to treating our staff, and much more difficult.
First up, the good news: You get paid substantially more as a Containment Psychiatrist than you do as a staff shrink. A LOT more. Not yacht-and-mansion money, but none of your kids will ever need to pay for college. You'll also be working with substantially fewer clients – usually one or two, maybe three at the most. You'll have to put in more work per client but you'll still be on reduced hours compared to what you used to be doing. This position also comes as a package deal with a substantial life insurance policy.
Which brings me to some of the downsides. As a Containment Psychiatrist, you won't be dealing with staff burnout from a comfortable office anymore. You'll be a containment specialist, on the front lines with our guards and MTF agents. This job has a similar mortality rate to them, even though you'll only ever be interacting with skips while they're contained. Or just before they breach.
Let me ask you guys something – why do you think you were offered this job?
Ha! Called it! Oh, there's one in every group. “Best of the Best”, yeah right. You're gonna sit there, having done the shit you've done, look me in the eyes, and tell me you're one of the best of the best? Living up to every stereotype about arrogant psychiatrists now aren't you?
Hmm? Oh yeah. We know. Don't feel bad, you're not alone. Shit, it's why you got offered this job. Everyone in this room has done something that makes the Ethics Committee gnash its teeth in fury. Some of you fucked your clients, some of you sold drugs on the side, some of you are just plain shitty psyches.
You got picked for this job because you're terrible psychiatrists, and that's the plain truth. Because you're unethical, and in this job, that's a big plus.
Let me ask you another question – what do you think the point of this job is? What's the point of giving these skips mental health care?
Ha. Another funny guy. No, your job is NOT to help them. I cannot stress that emphatically enough. In fact, if you ever find yourself possessed of a sincere desire to actually help any of your clients, report it to your supervisor. You'll be given a leave of absence to get your head together and re-assigned to other clients.
You are a containment specialist. Your job is to contain SCP objects. Just like our guards or MTF agents. Your job exists as part of the Foundation because someone realised that quiet, docile skips are easier to contain than skips on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
I realise most of you won't know much about actual conprocs, so here's the thing. Officially, sapient, humanoid SCP objects cannot be rated anything lower than “Euclid”, because there's no telling what they'll do once you get them in containment. I think that's bullshit. In my opinion, a sapient humanoid SCP object should never be rated anything lower than “Keter”.
Why? Think about it. Think about what we do to these people. They don't get visitations, vacations or parole. Most of them don't talk to anyone besides their guards and you. For years and years, if not decades. What do you think that does to a person? How do you think that affects their mental state?
Rhetorical question. I've been doing this job for ten years now, I'll tell you what it does. It means a) they spend every hour of every day planning their escape and b) they hate you.
Stick someone in a little concrete box with nothing to do all day, and their every waking moment will be spent collecting information to plot a way out. Memorising shit like when their guards change, the layout of the Site they're kept at, and the schedules of other SCP objects that might help them. These guys are constantly on the lookout for even the slightest slip up that might give them the opportunity to make a break for it.
If they were normal prisoners, we could stop them with good guards and strong gates. But these aren't normal prisoners. All it takes is for one of them to have one trick they haven't pulled out yet and there could be a dozen dangerous weirdoes wandering the halls.
And they are dangerous. They will kill you if they find you. They hate us for what we do to them, and a lot of them would gleefully kill any Foundation personnel they got their paws on.
Our job, as Containment Psychiatrists, is to short-circuit that hatred. When you go into a session with one of your clients, your job is not to help them. Its to manipulate them, to make them docile, to sucker them with some good old-fashioned Stockholm Syndrome. Our good and noble profession harkens back to the cowboy era of psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century, when the priority was on keeping patients quiet so you didn't have to deal with them. Straightjackets, drugs in the food and watercannons. That's what we're about.
Your client is going to spend their every unoccupied moment looking for a way out? Put in a request to the Site Director. Give them an Xbox. Give them a DVD player. Fuck, give them a Playboy. Give them shit to do in their cell – that WON'T help them get out – so they sit in there nice and quiet and fuck around instead of trying some sort of heroic jailbreak.
Any “help” your client receives from this is purely coincidental. A means to an end. You're going to sit in these sessions with your clients and they're going to tell you horror stories. They're going to tell you about how they've been standing on concrete for so long they've got chronic foot pain. They're going to cry into their arms while they tell you they can't remember what their family's faces looked like, or that they haven't spoken to a non-staff person in decades.
And you're going to coo at them and pat their hand and use active listening to make them feel better about it. You'll prescribe them some anti-depressants, or recommend they get some potted plants for their cell, or some other bullshit.
But you'll never actually help them. Because the only way to do that would be for them to breach containment and escape to the outside world. And you wouldn't be sitting here if you were kind enough to want to help them with that.
Ethics Committee? Ha! Good one!
Oh shit, you're actually serious?
Alright, here's the thing about the Ethics Committee – what we are for skips, they are for the Foundation, kind of. The real purpose of the Ethics Committee is not to stop us being unethical. It's to manage staff morale.
The Foundation keeps innocent people locked up. We feed live babies to howling monsters. We send D-class to their deaths daily. It starts to wear on you. The Ethics Committee looks for ways for you to do these things that don't make you want to run screaming for the hills or curl up sobbing into the foetal position. Because if you did that, the skips you're containing might get out.
Like, here's an example of a completely “ethical” containment. Somewhere in the Foundation, there's this vampire right? Like an actual, honest-to-god vampire. Eternal youth, severe sunlight allergy, the works. She isn't human – you couldn't become a vamp – but apart from that she's the real deal. She shrugs off everything that isn't a stake through the heart and can tear through steel with her bare hands. So you know how we keep her contained?
A bunch of researchers found out that if you spill some rice in front of her, she's compelled to count them, each and every grain. She has to drop whatever she's doing to count them and can't do anything else until she's finished. So we built a special cell. Every 90 seconds, a cup and a half of rice is dumped into it, with a special second cup of rice on standby if she somehow makes it through the lot before the next lot gets dumped in. She's trapped; all she does all day is count rice. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We don't give her the time to do anything else. We don't even stop when we shove a litre of blood in there once a fortnight to keep her alive. She hasn't managed to breach containment once in the last 30 years.
When you walked by her cell, you could hear her wailing from the other end of the hall. The Ethics Committee got wind of this, and leaped into action - they had the walls of her cell soundproofed.
Remember, the Foundation does not allow any sapient humanoid SCP object to be classified as “Safe”. We can't just push them into a storage locker, slap a padlock on it, and leave them there.
But we would if we could.
Yes, you can have another beer.