Let’s be angels

A while back, somebody pointed me to a website entitled Nurses Are Angels, dedicated to telling the world what angelic beings nurses are.

I’m not sure if the “angel” tag was ever supposed to apply to mental health nurses, since the esteem and respect afforded to us in the eyes of the public tends to be somewhere around the level of professionals in the Seal-Clubbing industry. We don’t flutter angelically around the ward dispensing healing and joys. We’re the gits who lock people up.

Ask where nurses trace their lineage from, and generally you’ll get an answer that it’s from Florence Nightingale, angelically waving her lamp in the Crimea (though if you’re a history buff, the life of Mary Seacole is far more interesting, and she was almost certainly a better nurse.) But mental health nursing actually traces from the days of asylum attendants, or “keepers” as they were first known. As in they “keep” people in one place, be it an 18th Century madhouse or a 21st Century acute ward. Later on, the attendants/keepers became merged into the nursing profession. Not really angels at all.

Though to be honest, regardless of which branch of nursing I personally think that the “angel” tag is in some ways just as insulting a stereotype as the “nurses are all slappers” label. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be in the process of becoming a nurse. It’s a profession where the most ordinary people achieve the most extraordinary things, and I’m reminded of that every day. However, nurses aren’t angels: we’re human beings. We make mistakes, we get drunk, we do all sorts of non-angelic things.

While we’re on the subect of stereotypes, I’d just like to add as a student nurse that all female student nurses are not slappers, and all male student nurses are not gay. I’m particularly gutted about the former, as it happens. I worked this one out in my first month of nursing studies, when a very pretty, blonde-haired girl sat down next to me in a lecture. She then proceeded to tell me in great detail about her deep, personal relationship with Jesus. It was at this point that it suddenly dawned upon me that being around lots of 18 year old fresher student nurses would not be everything that Leslie Phillips would have us believe.

Going back to the subject of the Nurses Are Angels website, it includes a page entitled Patients Say The Funniest Things. As that title suggests, it contains anecdotes that could only be considered hilarious by a person with major frontal lobe damage. Or a regular subscriber to the Readers Digest, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. This page left me thinking some rather perverse thoughts.

Now, I know that this blog is read by a combination of mental health nurses and service users, so let’s start a challenge. If you’re a nurse, post comments that could go under the heading, “Psychiatric Patients Say The Funniest Things”. If you’re a service user, do the same, except for the proposed category Psychiatric Nurses Say The Funniest Things.”

The winning account of people saying something bizarre/humorous/twatty wins a Nursing Angel Pin Badge. Not sure why you’d want to though, since it looks like a robot cockroach.

This post is rather disjointed, since I un-angelically got drunk this evening. Pass me my tarnished harp.