This Week in Mentalists (7)

Once again, it’s time to look at what’s been going on in the mental health blogosphere.

To nominate a blog for This Week in Mentalists, e-mail zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk

First, something cheerful. For the past few weeks we’ve been following Seaneen’s ongoing saga to finally get some benefits rather than continually having to take and then get fired from jobs she’s simply too ill to do. Finally, she’s hit a breakthrough, thanks to her new CPN.

Compare and contrast to my last CPN, who would meet with me once every month or two, be a half an hour late and then spend fifteen minutes nodding and taking notes. She and the psychiatrist were very fond of telling me that I needed to get a job to survive, rather than actually helping me sort out benefits.

The new CPN understands that I’m not working and the reasons why. It’s not laziness, or weakness, it’s that I physically and mentally can’t do it right now…She spent the duration of our hour-long appointment on the phone to the DWP finding out where I am with benefits. She also helped me with my income support form, made another appointment with Islington People’s Rights and basically reassured me that it might take a while, but it will be sorted out.

Rather less cheerfully, The Shrink has a patient with severe depression.

He described how he wakes in the early hours of the night, feeling grim. I can imagine him lying in the darkness, in total silence, with just his thoughts strirring, feelings of hopelessness consuming him. Sometimes he gets up to distract himself, turning on the television, sometimes he simply lies there wishing to be dead. Often he thinks he should be dead. He’s pondered different modes, seriously, and considered which owould be unacceptable and which he could do. Two days ago he ground up all his morphine tablets and went to sleep, awoke to take the powder and kill himself but thankfully couldn’t find it.

Nurse Ratched is worried that the health-and-safety culture on her ward is reinforcing the behaviours of patients with borderline personality disorder.

Now, it’s a whole new ballgame on psychiatric units, and the borderline patients know the rules. Patients are now placed on suicide watch if they so much as scratch themselves while they are in the hospital. Borderlines crave attention, and their behavior escalates as they receive more attention for their inappropriate behavior. What really burns my butt is that nurses are getting into trouble if these patients shed one drop of blood while they are in the hospital.

The Wife of a Schizophrenic is encouraging us to support the attempt of a mental health campaigner and service user to climb the summit of Mera Peak in Nepal. More info about his summit attempt here.

We’ve previously discussed the media panic over the MMR vaccine and autism. Neurologica is, to say the least, somewhat critical of those who continue to claim that MMR causes autism.

They seem to be driven by ideology and fear, their tools are misinformation, lies, and logical fallacies, and they have been tireless in waging war against vaccines. On their side are dubious and discredited scientists, misguided celebrities, naive or scaremongering politicians, and families who range from sincere but misinformed to ideological true believers. This antivaccination movement overlaps considerably with those who are anti-science or anti-scientific medicine (promoting instead some form of “alternative” medicine). They also enjoy much support from anti-government conspiracy theorists.

From what I’ve seen of the anti-MMR brigade, I agree entirely with Neurologica. No doubt somebody will scream at me for saying so, though.

We started on a cheerful note, so let’s end on one too. Over at Random Acts of Reality, it transpires that, contrary to popular belief, good quality dementia care can and does exist.

But here is the thing - the patients were all clean, their clothes were tidy and none of them were ‘tied down*’ to the chairs. There were also four nurses in the room engaging with the patients (even as one of them decided to have a root through our kit bag - and then started swearing at the nurse who told her that the bag didn’t belong to her).

So it was obvious that this was one of those good nursing homes that I always believed was out there but seldom witness.

A bit like the Loch Ness Monster.

And that’s your lot for this week.