Mental’s Christmas Message 2008

A followup to Mental’s Christmas Message.

Welcome to Mental’s Christmas Message 2008. Hopefully no one is reading this on the days itself and you are all merrily tucking in to turkey or your festive food of choice.

For those that can not be bothered reading a very long summary of the year post here is the important bit. I would like to thank everyone who over the previous year has made Mental Nurse the most wonderful blog by a mental health nurse with multiple authors ever. Particularly to all the post authors who have given of their time and effort to give us such entertainment and thought provokingness. Also all those who have had a guest post published. I especially enjoyed the Shrinks’ contribution. Also to all the commenters both old and new. Though oldschoolbaby is on the naughty list for not giving us a full post this year. All of us at Mental Nurse hope you have the best Christmas period possible and for those working the day itself we hope no one says the Q word.

I think this year the site has gone from strength to strength, despite some wobbles, and hope the next year will continue to see it grow and improve.

As always if anyone thinks they have anything to contribute please leave a comment, we are looking for new authors. We also would like to hear any ideas on how to improve the site and make it better. My current plan is to write a gateway page with links to the best and most important posts all suggestions welcome. This should help new readers get used to the way we do things.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Read on after the break for the first half of the year in Review.

Mental Nurse.

Here begins our round up of the year.

January saw an impressive 25 posts. Starting with the upbeat Today I Feel Good To Be A Nurse quickly followed by entirely serious Birthday wishes to the NHS . One of the posts of the month was When Psychoanalysts Attack including the following paragraph:

I’ll probably sound like a massively cynical old bugger by saying this, but my own opinion is that the reason psychoanalysts like Low hurl such vitriol at evidence-based practice is because there’s very poor evidence that their own massively expensive remedy is likely to do any good. Psychoanalysis puts in years of work, often for very little gain, and at times can make the client worse rather than better.

Another highlight was some high quality Crippen bashing with Drinking With Dr Crippen. Giving us this quote:

Partway down the discussion thread for that particular post, Dr Crippen manages to completely lose the plot and descend into self-parody when responding to a Crisis Team worker who made some fairly reasonable suggestions (at least, I thought they were reasonable) about how he and the CMHT could work together to help this patient.

February continued with more high quality Crippen bashing with Blogtitioner Alert

There has been a disturbing rise of ill informed comment masquerading as serious Journalism on what has become known as the “blogosphere” in recent months. These Blogtitioner lead “walk in centres” for news and current affairs are springing up all over the place and are a symptom of this Governments obsession with dumbing down and saving money. First it was our schools, then it was our health service and now it is our newspapers.

Z gave us an insight on how young people grow up to be the “nice man next door” with strange lumps under the garden lawn with Junior Psychopaths .

The debate on No-Harm contracts continued with the far too short Great Stupid Ideas in Mental health series.

Of course (and even my local psychiatrist realised this) all I have to do is lie to them if things do get worse and there’s nothing they can do, since they can’t prove any of these things have happened except hospitalisations, and in my experience asking to be hospitalised is the easiest way to ensure it does not happen. Consequently this piece of paper is worth shit, but it is a requirement of my approval for T.

Skipping ahead to March as there is so much to read and so little time before Christmas.

We were all looking at our fellow nurses trying to work out which one of them was going to sleep with a patient. Since nurses are promiscuous and sex fixated. E kicked off one of the classic Mental Nurse political debates by raising the topic of the Welfare State. Z gave us a little insight into his social life. If he wants to dress up in a mask an campaign against Science that’s fine with me…

April gave us a guest post by bruce on words a nurse should not use. Beakie gave me a very unpleasant mental image of how nursing treats it’s Bloody Students.

Some very wise person way back in the mists of time once said that nursing ‘eats its young’ and faithwalker’s experience illustrates all too vividly the continuing truth of that statement.

Beakie returned to the theme with the impressively titled Bloody Students 2: The Drone Wars where OSB gave some advice to our friend Dr Crippen:

Crippen, you`ve become as boorish as you are boring. I`ve always called for moderation in these medic – nursing spats but I`m fed up now.

To paraphrase yourself

FUCK OFF YOU TWAT !

I can`t get on to Crippen`s threads I`d be grateful if someone could cut and paste this over there, with OSB attached of course.

OSB is a God of the English language and here I publicly worship at his hairy feet in a non-idolatrous fashion. Somehow we avoided the legend that is Ted on the debate about short lived pro-suicide websites. Good debate in the comments and always nice to find out how checked shirt man is getting on. Later on the month gave us more Crippen Bashing and political debate from E.

From the Crippen bashing.

This is too much insolence. “I will not be lectured to on the existence of Master of the Universe Pixies by some jumped-up nurse specialist! Quack me no quacktitioning! You see, I am a doctor. That means that, unlike people who do not believe in Master of the Universe Pixies, I have insight!”

Beakie felt a little political type ranting was in order in the political comment thread:

Look at the NHS. Just look at it. Incompetent staff are harder to get rid of than C diff. This govt has thrown bucket loads of money at the service and where are we? Any better than ten years ago? Maybe a little, but not enough given the record amounts of investment. and yet more waste is in the pipeline – polyclinics being the latest white elephants in the making. They’ll go up, they’ll fail and the govt will spend another few billions reorganising us back to where we started.

Which brings us to May. May was fun.

Z discussed the issues surrounding Borderline Personality Disorder.

Utter those three fatal words in mental health services, and all the pejoratives come out. Let’s have a roll-call, shall, we? Let’s see, we’ve got “manipulative”, “demanding”, “drain on resources”, “not really a mental illness”…oh yes, and let’s not forget “untreatable”.

This inspired E to ask Does Mental Illness Exist? in case you can not be bothered reading the answer is yes. Unless you are Ted. If someone wants to remind me when Ted first came to us please point out the post. I have a blinding headache and do not want to make it worse by reading his drivel more than I have to.

E made many good points in his post.

Studying other cultures also reveals individuals engaging in certain behaviours that if seen here would be seen as a sign of mental illness but when seen within the context of a different culture are viewed as perfectly normal. It is even possible that some cultures may not even have a concept of mental illness that equates with our own at all seeing mental illnesses in spiritual or religious terms.

Ted on the other hand, the gripping one, did not.

I can not face reading it find your own quotes.

Skipping ahead to June we find some Buffoon wrote a guide on How To Be An Antipsychiatrist.

Effectively if something classed as a mental illness has a poorly known, or even unknown, physical basis it does not exist. If something currently classed as a mental illness has a known physical cause (dementia) it is a physical illness. Therefore mental illness does not exist.

This kicked off more Ted related ranting. I suspect he missed the sarcasm tags.

Later in the month Z posted about Doctors and Nurses and just what are they good for?

As for the nurses – well, they’re good at doing what nurses are meant to do, which is spend time with patients and develop a therapeutic relationship with them. A lot of our patients are lucky if they get to see the doctor once a month, and often it can be a lot longer than that. A nurse might be able to see them once a week or once a fortnight – or in the case of some of the more severely ill kids, it can be every day at times.

E gave us one of his best posts with My Brother The Alcoholic.

So bearing this in mind I am not ashamed to say that I intensively coached my brother in what to say and how to say it during the 10 minute drive to the hospital where we were duly seen (luckily) by the duty psych who had spoken to the GP earlier. I say fortunately because contrary to popular belief my colleagues and I are far less likely to play safe and recommend admitting an apparently suicidal patient with alcohol related problems.

Mr Ian rounded off the month with a couple of controversial posts. Not really that controversial but thought provoking. Theses were How To Get 300000 quid for not doing your job and DLA should not be given to people with disabilities.

I think it’s a sort of witch-hunt test that hails the old adage “If she doesn’t drown – then she’s a witch!”

Taking us nicely to the budy month of July. The Shrink stirred us up like a swarm of angry therapy bees by asking Why Have Nurses?

Really, stop and think for a moment. Maybe on in-patient units, where arguably nursing may still have a role for some patients some of the time (but is it RMN stuff?), some nurses may be needed some of the time. But not necessarily.

In the community, shouldn’t they all be banned?

E gave his one of his odder posts involving Number Theory. Leading to yet another debate on the state of the education system. Some quality OSB moments there.

Dr Crippen gave us a guest post asking more though provoking questions of us here at Mental Nurse. Just how stupid are we?

Your recent post is both fraudulent and dishonest. Whatever my view may be on “nurse specialists” I have consistently over the last three years campaigned for better pay for nurses.

E post Society Is Dead We All Hate Maggie led to a major bust up in the world of Mental Nurse. A link in the comments was removed and accuations of Stalinist style censorship were made. Much talk was made of leaving never coming back. Happily we still seem to have a full complement. Experimentalchimp made a good comment:

Who are you writing this for anyway? If it’s for an audience used to the form of post-modernist arguments why spend two paragraphs explaining what a social construct is? If it’s for a more general audience, why shoehorn your arguments into a post-modern framework that serves only to obscure them? Just because we can talk about something as a construct doesn’t mean we should when we can avoid it.

Mr Ian asked us to consider The Science of the Art of Madness.

I see psychopharmacology as kind of, if you remember, when you put your arms through someone elses arms while standing behind them and try to make a chocolate cake while having all the ingredients and equipment for every other sort of cake and a meat pie and some 3-in-1 oil available in front of you – but they were blindfold and you are relying on someone who doesn’t know what any of the items in front of them are and trying to tell you what to grab.

Skipping yet another discussion about benefits the next major debate kicked off with the post by E of Straight is Great, Bendy is Trendy.

From the outset John made it clear that he wanted objective proof that his sexual orientation was innate, that it was hard wired into his psyche from birth and not a product of his education or upbringing.

The end of July E wondered why we should have bothered training to be nurses, instead of becoming  psychologists.

August looks like it was a little quieter than July. But August will have to wait. It is now Christmas Eve and Mrs Mental has banned me from any more computer time so I will have to do part two by the New Year.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Mental Nurse

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