This Week in Mentalists comes a day early, as I’ll be a bit busy tomorrow.
Anyone wanting to nominate a blog for future editions please send your suggestions to zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk
So, on with our weekly round-up of mental health-related blogs.
NeuroLogica has been finding out about “tapping therapy”, which apparently stimulates certain emotions by tapping various parts of the body to stimulate nerves. He’s not impressed.
This is poetic nonsense. “Nerve channels” as presented in this “explanation” do not exist. There are nerve pathways that follow specific anatomical structures and serve specific functions, but no gateway to specific emotions. When tapping the wrist, for example, you are stimulating the corresponding sensory nerve and maybe cause some muscle stretch receptors to fire. This leads to activity in the sensory cortex and maybe parts of the brain involved with motor control. If the stimulation is painful this will activate pain pathways and the corresponding negative emotions that make pain a very unpleasant experience to be avoided.
But there is no hack into an emotion to which you can send “shockwaves” to “reset the system.” This is made up nonsense.
At Pole to Polar, Seaneen reflects on a suicide attempt from a month ago.
In the weeks after my suicide attempt, I did not feel any better and thought about it almost constantly. There was a voice in my head droning that I was a failure, unworthy of life, a disgrace. I felt that passersby saw into me and knew the deep nothing of what I was. My own flat, my own skin, felt like enemies.
I am a walking advert for why suicide is not the way out. A month on, I don’t feel like that anymore. At the time, I truly believed I was going to die, and if I wasn’t, then this was forever. My mood is still unstable; the few days of normalcy is ascending into somewhere I recognise. I don’t feel great today. But I don’t feel suicidal, and I couldn’t even have imagined feeling that way a month ago. So my message is: hang on, for a month, when you feel that way. Because a month makes a difference.
On the subject of suicide attempts, Maple Leaf Medic is shaken up by coming across a suicide attempt on the way to work.
The thing is: I’ve talked to suicidal patients, who’ve told me their plans in great depth. I’ve talked to people who’ve attempted suicide and regretted surviving afterwards. I’ve talked to people who say that if they leave hospital, they’ll do it again. It was hard but I can handle it. But seeing a body, seeing it so final (I don’t know if he was hit by a train, but there are signs everywhere that the tracks are live so anyone touching the lines would probably be electrocuted….) really shook me. Why wasn’t this man someone I’d see in the ER saying “I feel suicidal, please help”? Had he already been? What was his story? Why was he there? And why was I there?
Bipolar Mo is noticing some interesting dynamics at his day centre.
My trips to the day centre are going downhill. The honeymoon period is over and now there seems to be constant mini-feuds (“I’m not letting her speak to me like that”) among the clients and I find myself being drawn in and saying “Have you tried speaking to her and telling her how you feel?”. Shit, the last thing I want to be doing is psychiatric nursing again. What is quite bizarre is that there are a couple of ex-patients who now work as paid staff in the unit, well they now behave exactly as nurses on the ward… they stay hidden in the office all the time, working on their computers to produce a newsletter about people they have virtually no contact with. Isn’t that weird? It’s just like nurses spending all their time doing care plans.
Bonkers Bob is watching some videos about bipolar mania as spiritual emergency.
Meanwhile Liz Spikol has discovered that illegal immigrants in the US are being given psychiatric drugs to make them pliant while they’re returned to their home country. Give me your tired, your poor,. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…and we’ll inject the fucker with lorazepam?
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