I was going to do a quick post on having Kylie Minogue as a girlfriend but realised we had covered the topic before. Here and mentioned again here. Then I came across this.
Calls for more understanding of nurses with mental health problems
There is “no evidence” to suggest that a nurse with a mental health problem would not be good at their profession, according to the Nursing and Midwifery Council.
This seemed to follow on from this case (not wanting to inflame old arguments) reported by the BBC.
Nurse sentenced for patient abuse
A nurse who abused two 87-year-old men with dementia at a Cardiff hospital has been given a suspended prison sentence.
This contained the following gem.
The court heard that Rees was diagnosed at 19 with bipolar effective disorder with associated psychosis and once believed she was made of plastic and was going to melt.
Judge Stephen Hopkins QC has demanded an investigation into how a nurse with a history of mental illness was employed to look after patients with dementia.
Possibly she applied for a job? Hmmm?
Frankly I wish I had not found the article now and just inadvertently duplicated my previous Kylie related entry.
At the moment I’m being put through my paces at Occupational Health at the University I have a place at for next year (I deferred so that I could have surgery to remove my scars). I have Bipolar disorder and have been ill since I was 12. Up until recently I was severely depressed but getting on the right med regime has balanced me out for the first time in years. Due to my history, I want to help others and I already do the odd talk to other nurses and the samaritans. I’ve heard some people say that a history of mental illness, can actually be of use in this profession, which I’m hoping is the case.
Mental Illness does not automatically make you dangerous, just as not being mentally ill doesn’t automatically mean you’re of no danger to anyone else, but of course being ill gives people ammunition if something goes wrong. That’s the only difference. Anyway, I’m rambling, what I’m trying to say is except in extreme circumstances, people with mental illnesses should be treated the same and/or given extra support to help them do what they want.
I want to know what “bipolar effective” disorder is. It sounds like it might actually might make one better at her job. Also, what business do they divulging the specifics of her psychosis? Did she say that was okay?
In Olden Days it used to be called Manic Depression.
That’s what “bipolar affective” used to be called, but this “bipolar effective” is something new.
It’s what happens when you employ dyslexic graduates. Like squibs in Harry Potter, they can’t spell.
Sorry I never noticed
It does sound good. I did wonder why you were asking …
It’s when you’re alternately really really good and really really crap at your job.
and with medication you can become uniformly mediocre…
Interesting post and one I had to comment on. I’m currently a couple of months into my Access to Nursing Course at a college in Manchester and am going to University next September to start my MH Nursing Diploma. It’s been a plan of mine for a long time to become a nurse but because of caring commitments for my mum I couldn’t study – sadly she passed away earlier this year which has now enabled me to commit to studying.
I’m 32 and my diagnosis is Borderline Personality Disorder. However my diagnosis came late in life officially in 2008 mainly due to the fact I felt like no one was really listening to me originally! So for many years I was deemed as Depressed with Rapid Cycling Mood Swings!
I absolutely love life at college, I’ve found my niche in life… I am getting amazing grades and university life is something I am really looking forward to next year. I decided on MH in the end because I want to use my own life experiences to help others in their own times of crisis and need. One thing for sure is I am a good listener and I feel I have many qualities that will enable me to make the perfect MH Nurse.
I’ve never been a risk to anyone else, I know my limits if I start to get ill I pull back and take some time out. I feel I’ve reached a point in my life where most of my BPD symptoms are over… I’ve had it since my teens it just went undiagnosed for a very long time and I guess you could say I am in a point of recovery now.
There is nothing to say a ‘sane’ MH Nurse can’t flip out at a patient on a ward who pushes there limits too much. I was in an acute ward this year for a short time after my mother’s death and there was a patient who pushed the boundaries to the absolute limits with the staff for days on end, I often overheard them talking about ‘How they would like to kill her’ not exactly professional but you could see quite clearly how stressed they were getting over this elderly women!
When I read that initially, I was a bit miffed. Then I read the following bit:
“I don’t think anyone who suffers as Penny Rees suffers from her own psychiatric problems was best placed to be a nurse in such stressful conditions. I’m very surprised.”
I wonder if the bit before that, about “demanding an investigation how a nurse with a history of mental illness was employed to look after patients with dementia” was taken slightly out of context by the reporters. Going by the first quote I used, it seems to me that he meant that someone who’s difficulties affected them as they affected this particular person shouldn’t be nursing, rather than saying that all those with mental health difficulties should be excluded.
I do think you can take equal ops too far sometimes. Still when all the wards are all staffed by dyslexic degree qualified Nurses with cleft palettes and serious personality disorders as opposed to only appearing that way…………………..
Are you OSB’s batman?
OSB’s batty-boy actually ;-0
Of the things you mention, E, only one of them could potentially impair a person’s ability to nurse and then not always.
that thing being having a degree obviously
All joking apart I was talking to a link tutor the other day who was explaining how they had had to seriously consider an application from a prospective student who was blind and another from one who was wheel-chair bound. I ask you can you imagine it a blind nurse and one in a wheel chair trying to restrain a floridly psychotic patient, what next? Dead student nurses or ones in a persistent vegetative state complete with drips and tube feeding? I suppose the ones suffering from the more advanced forms of death could always be put on the 1:1 observations if we tied them to the patient with a rope while the brain dead ones could be propped up by the door with a clip board and told not to let anyone in or out.
the brain dead ones could be propped up by the door with a clip board and told not to let anyone in or out.
They already are, aren’t they? We used to call them “agency nurses”.
Re the 2007 posts on your link, Mental. I once received a severe telling off from a patient because of my familiarity. He was, after all, the Holy Ghost and expected greater respect. In another hospital I found this process being manipulated by a slaphead NA for his own amusement. I found a long-term patient from the locked ward (allowed out and about by himself because he was ok at present) in the pub over the road trying to ‘spend’ the gift coupons from Player’s No. 6 cigarettes which “Mr [Slaphead] gave me and said they were pound notes”.
VIRUS ALERT. My anti-virus software has just identified a virus in the ‘Organisations’ link BORDERLINE UK on the left of this page.
It’s just attention seeking
Oooooooh. Naughty!
It’s a swine.
In my opinion, whether someone is qualified to be a nurse, depends on their qualifications and their job-related skills. Mental illness can impair some skills required to be a nurse, such as stress tolerance. However, people not diagnosed with mental illness can also have very low stress tolerance, have a lack of communication skills, or other job-related skills, and people with mental illness may’ve learned to cope with their impairments so well that there is no reason to consider them unsuitable. A diagnosis alone doesn’t make someone unsuitable for nursing.
As. to E.’s comment about the possibility of blind nurses, I did a quick search on the AFB’s CareerConnect website (a toool that connects blind/visually impaired job seekers to mentors who are already employed) and, while I was unable to find any totally blind nurses, I did find several partially sighted nurses.
I’m a student mental health nurse – who is due to qualify in the not too distant future.
Yes there are days when I am incapable of doing the job, readers of my blog know that I had three weeks off not that long ago, with the university’s “permission” (least said about that the better). But there are a lot more days when I’m good at my job, besides most people get ill at some point in their working lives, I just tend to get the mental lurgy rather than the flu. I love my job, and I know that I can make a difference by being there – it might be a small difference.
I think the important thing with nursing teams in any area is the team i.e. the skill mix, and I believe that my experiences and the insight/empathy/compassion it gives me is an important contribution to that mix. Which isn’t to say that I think you have to be mental to work in mental health – hell could you imagine if everyone went off ill together? But I do think it has some advantages as well as disadvantages.
Also, as I pointed out to someone on my course, anyone can have a psychotic break, even if they’ve no previous psychiatric history – if anything the monitoring currently in place for me probably makes me a lot safer.
I’d also like to point out that there are certain stressful situations that I tolerate better than most of my “non-mental” colleagues – the “stress-vulnerability model” has some weaknesses.
My virus-checker suspects the Borderline UK website of “malicious content”.
so now it seems virus-check software comes with on-board irony.
It’s been reading Andrew Samuels.
http://google.com/safebrowsing.....euk.co.uk/
Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for borderlineuk.co.uk
What is the current listing status for borderlineuk.co.uk?
This site is not currently listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-12-03, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including wardrobehudson.co.uk/.
This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS26230 (TOTTAWA).
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, borderlineuk.co.uk did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.
As best I can tell it is probably safe.
My ESET NOD32 software gives the following result tonight:
File: http://wardrobehudson.co.uk/testv1_3
Threat: HTML/Iframe.B.Gen virus
As I blocked it yesterday it can no longer be analysed by this computer but as I recall, the threat was specifically to the C Drive, as might be expected.
I don’t believe self-regulation is acceptable here, surely this is a matter for the HPC? It appears we are being invaded through the wardrobe by a gang of rogue Narnian dwarfs with swine flu and a tendency to Postmodern irony.
Deleted the link anyway. I can not really be bothered to look through the site code to see if there is a threat. If we were all using MS-DOS and browsing with Arachne we would not need to bother about virus threats.
I needed Socrates to tell me what a clicky was I am so out of date with what ‘the kids’ are up to. When I were a lad we got viruses on our ZX Spectrum 48k Computers when someone spliced our Manic Miner tapes with pornography. Heady days.
Z keeps posting about what a bunch of fools people with BPD are anyway so why link to the site?
What is that Z?
What?
Ironing?
Irony?
Oh!
I feel that people with first hand experience of mental illness make for better nurses. If you’ve never had a halucination or delusion you can only guess at what the experience may be like, if you’ve had one then you can relate your experience to those of others, the same goes with depression and the whole spectrum of mental illness. If you have lost a loved one you know the kinds of things that helped (or still help) you cope with it and just having that empathy and being able to express it in verbal and non verbal ways really leads to good therapeutic relationships. I feel the reason some MH nurses get it so very wrong is because they lack the empathy that personal experience brings and people pick up on this. Sometimes people can just sense that you genuinely understand them, not just attempt to understand and this insight is worth more than anything that can be taught in college. The key is that the nurse should be in control of their own mental health as the work is stressful.
I think it is important for people who currently have or have experineced mental illness to be heavily involved in nurse education and not just wheeled in as a token gesture by lecturers, but actually involved in devising models of care, their teaching and implementation. This will take break down of the professional/patient barrier that seems to me to be as strong now as it was when I started nursing 10 years ago.
yes yes yes again
have been absent, but this calls for a plug for ‘Psychiatric Tales’ by Darryl Cunningham – it’s an MH comic book, a really exceptional piece of work imo out jan 2010:
http://darryl-cunningham.blogs.....-results=4
this is the chapter on schizophrenia
darryl has been an hca & student nurse has his own mh history – very talented guy
as a staff member – there are many good staff, however some are bad – what is clear though is that the one’s that have mental illnesses are always good – empthatic, listen and are good at considering people’s rights.
I think it is very beneficial for the service users to have staff that have experienced recovery for themselves. But this doesn’t mean you need to disclose personal information
I also work in a well known mental health charity – the service users there have frequently commented that they would prefer to have someone working with them who has experienced recovery for themselves rather than someone who has just read up about it.
There are many influencial people in the mental health field – many have suffered and recovered from mental illnesses – and it is these people that are more likely to give others hope and they can also help to change the system for the better.
I think it would be extremely sad if university’s didn’t allow people who have experienced mental illnesses to be able to study as they fear they will be more likely to experience stress.
Fact is that everyone is susceptible to stress – a lot of it depends what current personal factors contribute to how much and what level of support you will get once employed.
from my experience it is the unrealistic demands from management (ie targets, targets, targets),lack of other staff and adequate support, battling with other ‘professionals’ who don’t understand how mental illness affects people, the lack of non-medical therapies available to help patients and just the pressure from up above (I mean from the big cheeses, not from God!) to have to rush around and not having enough time to spend with people and to think and plan their care clearly that causes stress amongst MH workers. If there wasn’t all this stress then the workers would be freed up to absorb the stress of caring for the patients, but with all the additional stress due to the NHS being run by facists it can result in an overload and I think it can even cause people who had no previous mental illness to become unwell. You don’t have to be mad to work here, but you will be soon!
“It’s like a madhouse in here.”