violence

Just an afterthought regarding my previous post on how the mainstream media don’t seem interested in the fact that mentally ill people are committing fewer and fewer murders. Much as we castigate the media for assuming that anyone with a mental illness is an violent criminal, are health services necessarily innocent of this thinking?

How often have we seen the following words written in a referral letter from one health professional to another?

“Mr Smith has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but has no history of violence or aggression towards others…”

What, we couldn’t just assume that if there’s no mention of violence in the letter, then that means there’s no history of violence?

By comparison, it’s hard to imagine a referral letter beginning with the words…

“Mr Smith has a diagnosis of chlamydia, but is unlikely to pork your daughter.”

Following on from the news that people with mental health problems are now less likely to kill themselves, it now transpires that they’re also less likely to kill other people too

The Guardian’s Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre picks up the story, and makes some interesting observations on the attitudes of the media to mental illness and violence.
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So, if positive symptoms cause violence, why aren’t there as many violent incidents to reflect this linearly?

As pointed out by beakie, not all hallucinatory experiences are bad ones. But is it the bad ones that cause violence in mental illness?

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Mental health and violence has long been given an erroneously represented causal link. Indeed, it has long been the promulgation of sensationalist reporting of ‘mental patient does harm’ that has sustained this misconception. For some time there has been a post on Mr Man’s Wife’s blog on just this topic.

I decided to bring some of the thinking over to here and add to previous discussions on the topic.

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Such is the astonishing discovery by the Healthcare Commission and the RCPsych

More than half of nurses on mental health wards have been physically attacked, a survey suggests.

Nurses working with older people are the most likely to be assaulted, the joint Healthcare Commission and Royal College of Psychiatrists report said…

Some 46% of nurses in mental health wards for working age patients said they had been assaulted.

For those working in older people’s wards this rose to 64%.

Most of these attacks happened in those wards caring for people with “organic” conditions such as dementia rather than “functional” problems such as depression and schizophrenia.

Nurses reported they had suffered fractures, dislocations and black eyes…

A fifth of clinical staff working with older people said they were attacked, with the figure dropping to 13% of those working with working age people.

I think this can be filed in the big file marked “bear’s woodland-based defecatory habits and Papal Catholicism”. I know that getting an idea of the extent of violence against nurses is important and worthwhile, but it seems to me that nothing new really emerges from these studies and I also wonder what effect it has on the image of the profession. “Want to be a mental health nurse? Which kind of violent assault would you like to experience?”

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