This Week in Mentalists (44)

Thank you to Cellar Door for stepping into the being-shouted-at-by-the-Shrink breach while I was away. I’m now back in the saddle.

Anyways, time for This Week In Mentalists, our weekly round-up of mental heatlh blogs.

Aethelred the Unread has some advice for when applying for incapacity benefit.

It really is important to stress the full range of effects that a particular problem or symptom has on your day-to-day life both when filling in the form and when talking to the DWP doctor. The reason for this is that you’re not trying to convince the decision maker that you’re ill, but that your illness affects your ability to work. This can seem fairly obvious when it’s written down, but it can take some getting used to, particularly in the consultation with the DWP doctor.

Seaneen has had a medication review.

He said he was severely limited in what he could prescribe. Nothing that causes weight gain (I’m being treated for Body Dysmorphic Disorder, but doesn’t Effexor cause weight gain?), no SSRIs because they send my mood sky high and nothing that can be overdosed on since the medication is for suicidal depression. So Effexor, then, which hits other stuff at a higher dose.

Dumped By a Hallucinatin is not a Mad Pride-er

I don’t know if they ought to be respected for their pride in who they are, or stared at disbelievingly for their lack of need for privacy, but I’m not one of them, and I doubt I ever will be. I am terrified that someday, anyday, someone will find out that the CAMHS clinic I’ve been spotted walking into isn’t the Family Clinic that it says on the signpost; that I actually do get driven crazy by stress; that when they ask if I’ve been taking my meds lately they are walking on touchy ground. That the CBT therapist toyed with the idea of calling me schizophrenic.

Coloured Mind and Scattered Thoughts has been referred to a crisis team.

The combination of a change of meds and a new assertive outreach worker is not treating me well. The CAT/HTT (crisis and assessment/ home treatment team) people got involved yesterday so now I have the joyous experience of strangers coming over to give me meds and watch me take them. Its annoying to say the least but at least it has calmed my parents down.

Writing in the Margins of my Mind contemplates suicide risk assessment.

Read a very interesting statement about me today, in a letter from my psychiatrist to my GP:

“It remains very difficult to assess Megan’s level of risk to herself, as she refuses to talk about suicidal ideation or plans, although she continues to hint at suicidal thoughts”.

Part of that is that I have for some reason never ever spoken about my plans to anyone, even when they’ve been concrete. I’ve said I want to, even occasionally that I was going to, but never what I was going to do. I’m not sure what that’s about. But part of it is a little trickier.

We tread a fine line, us mental patients, when it comes to topics like this. I’d hate to be carrying out risk assessments, to be honest, because I reckon we’re a smart and tricksy lot.

It must be slightly different in an adult mental health setting, where an identified serious threat to your life would be responded to by hospital admission or the involvement of crisis services. In CAMHS, that’s not the flashing red light, though – it may happen, sure, but the real threat is that they’ll tell your parents.

Social work blogger Fighting Monsters tells you how to make a complaint against her.

Things that scare people into action:

* Threatening to go to the press. The local press works much better at this point. I was discussing with a friend of mine who wanted to make a complaint about her parking fine (when she had a disabled badge). She was writing a letter explaining how she had ‘contacts’ in the national press (her husband used to work for a national newspaper). I told her local works better. The Telegraph or Independent are far less likely to be interested in an unfair parking fine than the Sutton Telegraph or the Croydon Independent.

* MPs/Councillors. This gets management in local authorities moving like nothing else. When we get a complaint letter from an MP or Councillor it gets assigned immediately to top priority and to one of the more experienced workers. Sometimes they were over quite trivial matters in comparison to some of the work you were being taken away from and it really emphasised to me that the people who shout loudest get the best quality of service which isn’t how it should work. But it does – so if you need to, use it. I would do it myself and would advise anyone else to.

The Shrink enjoys teaching.

Teaching small groups of nurses and social workers, student nurses, occupational therapists and support workers does give people the opportunity to ask about small things they would like to know about or clarify. It also means we can share new information. It’s healthy for teams, I feel, since we can all get together and bat out our views on a topic and there’s a sense of collective “buying in” or cohesion at the end of it.

Not Another Nursing Student describes a female forensic ward.

Our womens ward is probably the nicest decorated, with comfy furniture, fresh flowers and windows that open a bit. So why does no-one want to work on it? There is an almost universal dislike of working with our female patients; offer people overtime and they will specify ‘only if you don’t put me on she-wing’. This is not only the male staff, but most of the women as well. I can understand some of the men; the risk of being accused of being inappropriate is quite real, and I have often heard female patients threatening to cry rape if they don’t get what they want. Still, for many men this is just an excuse, and what bothers them is what bothers the female staff. It is the emotion on the ward. The image of the hysterical female is quite common, and largely it is just that – an image. But there is definately a lot more shouting, screaming and crying on the womens ward. It makes people uncomfortable, still, to see women acting this way; we seem to be able to handle the ‘ladette’ culture much more easily.

Schizophrenia – A Carer’s Journal has received a home visit from his son.

He could not settle but kept moving from one thing to another.

He would light a cigarette then half way through roll another and light it – discarding the first. He went to rest in his bed then came down within seconds for a “smoke break”.

“We’ll ring James and I’ll go on the run,” he said. He is desperate to be out of there. I am sure a large part of his current distress (“illness”) is that he is locked up against his will.

He believed they were going to lobotomise him. He was genuinely frightened. Where has that come from?