September 2005

Two blogs:

Rantings of a student psychiatric nurse

28 years old. Male. Undergraduate Mental Health Nursing student. I also have a diagnosis of ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with Psychotic symptoms’. It used to be really bad - hearing ghosts - severe depression - repeating - counting - praying. Over and over. And over again. And I don’t even believe in god :oD

Trust Me, I’m A Mental Doctor!

For years people have been told to “trust me, I’m a doctor”, well what happens if your doctor turns out to be something of a nutter? That’s what happens to my patients. They think they are dealing with a ‘normal’ 26 year old SHO who works in a busy inner-city Northern hospital. However, in reality they are dealing with a woman who up until the age of 23 was severely depressed and self-harmed.

My trust cares about it’s dedicated staff, it’s very serious about the zero tolerance campaign against staff violence. It’s even discussed encouraging police to take action against mental health patients. If their violence has nothing to do with their mental health problems of course.

Please keep this in mind when reading the rest of the entry.

I previously discussed the usefulness of downloading stuff from the Internet. Regrettably they downloaded my new job description from the Internet.

This is the base they used for my job, I will discuss and provide guidance to interpretation.

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I am the person who owns, managed, produced and edited the British Asylums website.
With great reluctance and a lot of regret I decided to close it.

It WAS a very, very popular site - something which still amazes me! But it WAS also hard work and very demanding - it was an extremely difficult decision; at present I have neither the time or the energy.

However, to be honest, one of the things I really sought was feedback and input from “Old” RMN’s - in a manner of speaking, the “Memoirs” bit was popular; TWO people offered to “share their experiences”. So, if anybody wants to share the workload . . . ?

Best wishes to all

PS - I do hope that it hasn’t gone for good!

I am away for the next couple of weeks. I am going to be very very far from the Interwebnet. I should hopefully be back in approx two weeks.

Have a lovely time, I will miss you all.

Mental Nurse

Was speaking to a retired general nurse today.

She was chatting about how she used to do the ECT at the local asylum in the old days. The inmates, her word, used to get up to all sorts of things.

This got us chatting about the good old days.

Imp: If the person who used to run the British Asylums web site is reading this could they please get in touch.

Some staff with a certain amount of experience love to talk about the good old days of the big fat asylums.

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An update from Obsessive on his Quest To Become A Nurse.

Here it is:

Mental

It seems the luck fairy has made an appearance this week. Not only
Have the occy health department given me medical clearance despite my
being insane, but a local psychiatric hospital has also offered me a
bank support worker post. I’d really like to take up the offer so I can
get some extra experience (and cash) - providing I don’t take on too
much and bugger up my degree work. While on clinical placements I’ll
also have academic work to do, so there might not be any time to work a
couple of bank shifts…

I danced the Happy Fairy dance when I heard your news.

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