This article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/02/mental-health-peer-support-workers?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038
links to a website about research into mental health recovery: http://www.researchintorecovery.com/conference/
I shall be wishing them well and hoping that the conference goes well and that they make progress in their studies.
Thank you Louise for attracting our attention to this first class article in the Guardian. I have been saying similar things for three years now to our local mental health services.Not that anybody has taken much notice of it as far as I know. It wasn't the doctors or the nurses who gave my son back the will to live after he tried to kill himself. All they did was watching him and medicating him. The only person to talk to him kindly was an older lady, fellow patient, who took him under her wing, treated him like a normal, intelligent person and gave him back the hope that he will get out of there soon.
ReplyDeleteHi.
ReplyDeleteI am glad your son found a friend in the hospital - but yes, mental health nurses can be quite remote in their attitudes. In fact, I was talking to a friend this morning about how people working within mental hospitals become inhumane. She said she thought the problem was in the system, not the people working it, and I said I know that is the case to some extent, but that is not all of it.
It is just not normal or nice to pin patients down face first on a bed and inject them with medication - and yet that is a routine occurence in a mental hospital. That dehumanises both the patients and the people administering the medication who believe that this is an acceptable form of treatment.
It is such a shame that there is so little kindness in the system as it stands - a little kindness goes a long way in a mental hospital and I will always remember the lovely nurse who sometimes helped me settle my baby in the evenings after my final breakdown almost twelve years ago, and who spoke to me as if I was just a normal mother undergoing ordinary difficulties.
All the best
Louise