Matthew, Tara and Pat are tonight's crisis team. From 8 p.m. on this rainy Sunday until 8 a.m. the next day, this M.A.S.H.-like counseling unit must be ready to handle hotline calls, walk-in clients and mental health emergency calls dealing with suicide, family abuse, chemical dependency and major psychiatric episodes. For their services, these lay counselors will clear about $50 each on this all-night shift.

The staff of paraprofessional crisis workers at White Bird Clinic include a handful of social workers, but most are an eclectic assortment of ex-gang members, former drug addicts and prostitutes, veterans of war and life on the streets, victims of abuse and domestic violence. They are scarred, tough-minded survivors who serve the people nobody else wants to deal with, the folks who fall between the cracks. For the many people in this Northwest community who are alienated and estranged from family and friends, White Bird's crisis workers are a lifeline --not just for the seriously mentally ill but also for those who are unable to cope with personal problems and crises of the spirit.

Call us what you want, Pat says, but just don’t call us shrinks, man. On the crisis team, Pat has long been one of the most outspoken critics of the psychiatric community: He thinks that most shrinks, even with their books and manuals and medical training, can't tell the difference between a truly lethal suicide case and a common, everyday depressed drunk.

At their weekly meetings, White Birders gather in the clinic's community room, sit on the floor on oversized cushions and speak with the passion of disciples, as if tongues of fire have descended on all those in the room.

"Sometimes when a session goes well and you really connect with a client, it's like...magic."

"There's an energy that flows between everyone in the room."

"We were awesome in this intervention. You should have seen us. We were just awesome."

The most experienced counselors know how seductive crisis intervention can be. The world stops, and everything is reduced to intimate conversations. People in pain trust you with their deepest secrets. They are sharing their troubles, their pain, their anguish. They are praying to you, asking you to take away the pain and help them live again. Imagine the sense of power. Imagine playing God every day.

But there is a flip side. How do you handle the failures? How do you avoid self-blame when your client decides to kill himself, or stay in an abusive relationship, or relapse into drug addiction? Do you keep asking yourself if there was anything more you could have done? Or can you ease your mind by knowing that you did the best you could and at least tried to be there for someone?

Tonight Matthew, Tara and Pat are here to serve, but the shift is deceptively calm. Could this be one of those nights when they pass the time munching on pizza, watching old movies, reminiscing or catching up on paperwork? The clinic may look like a ramshackle operation, but the place runs on process. Funding depends on good record keeping. Each intervention is logged and evaluated: What is the presenting problem? Client history? Behavior description? Clinical and diagnostic impression and assessment? Intervention plan and disposition for the client?