Thanks for all your support, suggestions, and questions. I'm starting to get some more perspective on this situation. First my therapist did give a fuller response to me, saying that it was a long conversation but in short he is aware that abuses of power have been quite harmful to me and that could lead to lots of empathy for clients. Since it does reach into something personal, I am reluctant to discuss this with my supervisor at this point. I may though bring it up very generally since he has worked for this place in various positions and would perhaps have a larger perspective on how it works. Plus he is licensed and pretty client-centered so he might understand why I would have a different response than the rest of the staff.

The facility is not a locked unit, though it is sorta run as if it were. There is a clinical director who is a licensed social worker, but she oversees every residential unit in this large system of board and care.

To make things more complicated, many of the residents, including the one taken away, are conserved, meaning they have lost a lot of power over what happens to them. Either a coordinator or a conservator calls all the shots. Those people are not at the facility and are not observing the client day to day. The clients often also have special teams that work them, also not on site and called in from outside. That is what happened in this case. People from outside were called in and had power trips with each other, changing what was happening with this client seemingly on a whim and leaving no room for the client to try to cooperate or have a say in any of it. They essentially escalated the situation, making it worse. I think for most of the day the workers at the facility were trying to keep the resident from having to leave, but simply did not have the power to do so and then just were complicit in the whole thing. Still it was wrong. She was not a danger to herself, others, or gravely disabled, the legal requirements for a hold. She was showing some symptoms like being more labile and scattered, but there are so many ways to handle that that would be helpful and supportive instead of dragging her off to not one but two locked units, which in her mind are the equivalent of concentration camps. Of course then it becomes a vicious cycle since she probably became more and more symptomatic due to this treatment. I probably can find a way to let her know that I was concerned about her and felt it was badly handled. I did express dismay while it was happening and talked to the administrator a few times so it wouldn't be a surprise if word got back to them.