June 2005

Where was I ?

Things based on natural ingredients are always good for you. Agreed ? St Johns Wort, popular amongst the miserable, is bad for asthma. We, nurses & doctors, get annoyed when people don’t tell us what they are taking.

The next common idea is psychiatric drugs are bad for you. They have been developed by large pharmaceutical companies that had links with the nazi regime; they have been tested on only the cutest puppies and kittens; they have no beneficial effects and make you impotent just before killing you.

Or worse !

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Mental:

“Hello Ethel, how are you after your unpleasant psychotic experience where you thought you were being eaten from the inside by bugs ? Do you think it might have had something to do with the large amount of cannabis you smoked the previous week ?”

Ethel: (patient or staff, doesn’t really matter)

“Hello Mental. I feel much better. The bugs have left my system, my pixie friends will protect me. No the cannabis was not to blame, it’s all natural and therefore harmless.”

Mental:

“Ethel; you are a complete and utter …“

and so on.

There seems to be a belief that if something grows in the dirt that it is good for people. As a corollary to this is the belief that all tablets are bad, very bad.

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I was sitting in a common area outside an acute admissions ward. Waiting for a friend, a member of staff.

Happily listening to my music on my Walkman at the end a late shift. The night charge nurse walked past, I smiled at her as I was tapping my foot in time to Stereo Total. The night charge nurse walked into the acute ward I was expecting my friend to appear from.

I heard the door opening. Smiling I got ready to greet my chum.

Then it went a little awry.

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Came across some of the following lists when browsing amazon:

Borderline Personality Classics

Some being bonkers books

MENTAL HEALTH

Dementia Care

Happy spending.

Many areas of MH nursing require the use of evil. Probably many areas of all nursing but I will write about what I know.

Some of the following is planned to be aggravating & provocative.

First of all a definition of evil from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary:

adjective 1 deeply immoral and malevolent 2 … 3 extremely unpleasant

Number 2 involves the devil, I may return to Nursing and Satan in a later post

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Nurses and patients do this all the time.

They begin with the opposite of whatever they are about to do.

I’m not normally one to ask for tablets but can I have some lorazepam, you know the blue one ?

I don’t normally speak ill of patients but Mr Smith is a nasty piece of work.

And the classic.

I like nurse Smith. But she is a complete cow and useless at her job. If she was here I would say this to her.

Of course this is never said to the person.

This is not what I actually want to write about today. Today the topic is mental health nurse humour.

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I was intending to write about choice in mental health but in absence of hard and fast information about what this would actually mean in practice can’t think of what to say.

“Hello Mr Smith, you have been detained under the mental health act, which hospital would you like us to lock you up in ?”

With the current bed crisis in our area I can’t see much choice for people requiring inpatient care. Enough of them get sent to London as we run out of beds here anyway.

“Mr Smith, now you’re out of hospital you have the choice of receiving care from your locality mental health team, or you locality mental health team. If you refuse to choose you’ll end up back in hospital”

Again not enough resources to offer a huge amount of choice.

I suspect choice would be aimed at the ’softer’ end of mental health. Those whose problems don’t require significant amounts of nursing care.

What I can talk about though is supporting people.

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Why has Mary been voted out from the Big Brother house ?

There is no justice, this is plainly prejudice against the mad and deranged !

I like her.

Love

Mary O’Leary

But I’m worried.

Unless she’s plant !

Paranoia ?

Botany ?

Sometimes I just want to punch myself in the mouth.

My new job involves a high amount of personal care. Which fairly rapidly becomes the norm.

At the beginning of being a Mental Student I dreaded the thought of person-handling another’s nether regions filled me full of unpleasant fear.

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