Today I am being featured as a "Depression Hero" on this blog. It's very flattering to be considered a hero by someone, but do I really deserve the title?
One of the things that I have learnt since beginning this blog is that there are some really nice people out there in the blogosphere. There are people who have encouraged me to keep writing when I was finding it difficult, people who are worried when I don't write a post and will send me an email to make sure that I am okay, people who are kind enough to comment, people who love to hear about my knitting exploits, and people who just read the blog because they like what I have to say or the way that I say it.
Perhaps the best thing to have happened to me since I started this blog is that I have made a number of virtual friends as well as a few who are no longer virtual but who I meet on an occasional basis. The fact that I am old enough to be mother to each of these new friends doesn't matter. I offer a virtual ear to listen to their problems and they offer support to me when I am at my lowest. It is a mutual help function that is somehow missing in much of life today.
One of the things that I have learnt from blogging is that there is much that we can do to help someone who we don't know and who may be located in a town or city, or even a country, far away from our own. And much help can be received from them. Mental health bloggers are wonderful at supporting other mental health bloggers when things are not going well. It is because we have some understanding of what the other person is going through, that we can empathise and offer support that is based on experience. We won't ever tell a fellow sufferer 'to pull yourself together' nor will we ever allow a fellow sufferer to feel alone when a few words from us can make the difference that shows that there is someone out there who cares.
If that is what makes a Depression Hero then perhaps I am one. All I have ever wanted to do with my blog is to give others an idea of how I cope with long-term severe depression and perhaps hope to do something to help to reduce the discrimination and stigma that is associated with mental illness. I am really very proud, and a little embarrassed, at being Wendy Love's first Depression Hero, and I look forward to reading about more of her heroes as the weeks pass by.
Showing posts with label discrimination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discrimination. Show all posts
Monday, 24 May 2010
Monday, 15 February 2010
No Regrets
It seems as though what I wrote in Part 9 of Tackling the Mental Health Minefield has upset a few people. In answer to them, I can only say that this is my blog, and the accounts of my stay in hospital are true. Nothing is made up, in fact some of the things that happened were worse than those that I have written about.
While we probably don't have the institutional ill-treatment of patients that was so common 20 or 40 years ago, there is still a problem that so many of the people, that is to say the nurses, who should be helping those who are in mental hospitals, whether they be there voluntarily or because they have been sectioned, treat being a mental nurse as just a means of earning money and make no effort to interact with the patients or understand how they are feeling during what is probably a very scary period of their life.
One of the reasons that I began writing the series of posts was so that others could read a first hand account of what is happening in one of our mental hospitals and see that not everything is rosy. I have tried to ensure that no prejudice is apparent in what I write. It is not easy, but I believe that I have been successful in doing this. The discrimination that I saw exhibited while I was in hospital was appalling because it was the nurses who were responsible for it. The fact that a West Indian member of staff would make time for a patient who was of West Indian origin and yet tell a white English girl to go back to her room and stop being a nuisance when all she wanted was a clean towel was a classic example of the kind of discrimination that I saw.
So, if anyone was upset by what was said in the post, then I am afraid that is your problem. Me, I have no regrets about what I wrote and will continue to write in the same way that I always have. Truthfully, and with no holds barred.
While we probably don't have the institutional ill-treatment of patients that was so common 20 or 40 years ago, there is still a problem that so many of the people, that is to say the nurses, who should be helping those who are in mental hospitals, whether they be there voluntarily or because they have been sectioned, treat being a mental nurse as just a means of earning money and make no effort to interact with the patients or understand how they are feeling during what is probably a very scary period of their life.
One of the reasons that I began writing the series of posts was so that others could read a first hand account of what is happening in one of our mental hospitals and see that not everything is rosy. I have tried to ensure that no prejudice is apparent in what I write. It is not easy, but I believe that I have been successful in doing this. The discrimination that I saw exhibited while I was in hospital was appalling because it was the nurses who were responsible for it. The fact that a West Indian member of staff would make time for a patient who was of West Indian origin and yet tell a white English girl to go back to her room and stop being a nuisance when all she wanted was a clean towel was a classic example of the kind of discrimination that I saw.
So, if anyone was upset by what was said in the post, then I am afraid that is your problem. Me, I have no regrets about what I wrote and will continue to write in the same way that I always have. Truthfully, and with no holds barred.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
Tackling The Mental Health Minefield Part 9 - The Nurses: Carers Or Prison Warders
(This post continues the story from Tackling The Mental Health Minefield Part 8 - OT? What OT?)
The people that patients have most interaction with while in hospital (apart from other patients) are the nurses. Although in these days of tight budgets the number of nurses on a ward is supplemented with the addition of unqualified staff and in the hospital that I was in these members of staff are known as Care Support Workers. When in an ordinary hospital you have a reasonable idea of who is staff (they wear a uniform) and who is a patient (they will generally be lying in a bed or wearing night clothes and a dressing gown. In a mental hospital it is often far more difficult to make the differentiation. The nurses don't wear uniform and the patients are usually wearing normal every day clothes.
The funny side of all this is that on more than one occasion I had both patients and staff speak to me thinking that I was a member of staff. I'm not sure why this should have happened; whether it was because I didn't look like a mental patient or because I looked as though I knew what I was doing, I'm not sure.
This post will be broken down into several sections and cover areas and say things that I am sure may be upsetting to some mental nurses. Any criticisms that I make are directed at the staff that I had interaction with during my stay in hospital and not to all mental nurses, so those professionals who read this please do not think too harshly of me for I am only reporting it as it was during my incarceration.
Named Nurses
Okay, we all know about named nurses. They are the one's who you can go to when you have problems and they are supposed to be your first port of call if you are having problems. That's fine if the nurses work some sort of regular shifts, but the nurses on the two wards that I was on seemed to work a fair amount of double shifts so you would see a nurse for a couple of days and then you might well not see them again during your stay on the ward. On the first ward I was on I was assigned a male nurse 'M' as my named nurse and I can report that at no time while I was on the ward, and he worked at least four of the eight days that I was on the ward, did he ever introduce himself to me or even talk to me. This defeats the object of having a named nurse, doesn't it?
On the second ward that I was on, my named nurse introduced herself to me on my second day on the ward, and then told me that she was going to be off for the next week. At no time during my three weeks on the ward did she make any effort to actually talk to me, and I am afraid that I have to say that she was the nurse who ran around like a headless chicken when I had my angina attack and wouldn't give me my GTN spray until she had found a second nurse to be with her while she opened the drug trolley.
As far as I can see the named nurse is a good idea in theory but it is rarely going to work properly because of shift patterns and the fact that the nurses rarely seem to leave the office.
The Office
From reading other blogs it is apparent that those of us who have been inpatients in a mental hospital all have the same opinion that the nurses spend far too much time in the office writing reports about the patients and nowhere near enough time actually interacting with the patients that they are writing reports on.
My first ward had a large office that was big enough for most of the nurses and care support workers to spend much of their shift in there. Sometimes the only member of staff who was not in the office was the one going round doing the hourly checks on where the patients were. the office on the second ward I was on wasn't large enough to swing a cat in and yet at most times of the day all the members of staff would be locked away in there except for the person going round the ward doing the hourly checks and the person sat outside the office keeping an eye on one of the patients, J.
J would walk up and down the main corridor of the ward for hours. She wasn't allowed any leave and rarely had visitors; the only time that she left the ward was to go to the meeting room where ward rounds were held. J also ate constantly if she could get her hands on food. Any food. She would go into the kitchen area and take handfuls of sugar and eat it. The result was that the staff stopped putting sugar out for us to use in hot drinks except in sachets. this didn't stop J, because she would just take a handful of them and eat the sugar, throwing the packets down wherever she happened to be at the time. She would also take the little containers of jam, marmalade and honey that we had at breakfast and supper by the handful and lick the contents out of the containers while walking up and down the corridor. All that the staff ever did was to tell her not to eat the sugar or the jam. She was not told to pick up the rubbish that she would leave lying around. It was the patients who decided that something needed to be done because we were sick of finding half-eaten containers of jam in the box in which the jam and butter were stored. By watching J, and every time she threw rubbish on the floor or put empty containers anywhere other than in the bin, one of the patients would tell her to pick up the rubbish and put it in the bin, likewise with the jam containers. After a week or so of this J started to put the rubbish in the bin automatically. Because the staff spoke to her in such weak tones, and the patients used authoritative voices as one would with a naughty child, so J learnt what was acceptable and what was not. If the member of staff who was assigned to watch her walk up and down the corridor for hours during the day had been used to engage her in some meaningful activity then I am sure that it would not have been long before it was no longer necessary to have a member of staff monitoring her all the time.
My question is, why do so many of the staff need to spend so much time in the office ostensibly writing reports on the patients? Because they spend so much time in there and so little time with the patients, anything that they write must be a fairytale anyway.
Protected Time
Protected times are something that seem to exist in all mental hospitals. They are useful because it means that certain things can be done on the ward without unnecessary people (and that does include visitors) being around. This means that mealtimes were protected times and each morning the hour between 11am and midday, was protected time. There were notices to this effect at the entrance to the wards and they made it quite clear that the hour of protected time before lunch was for the nurses and patients to interact.
The problem was that this never seemed to happen. This hour each morning when nothing was happening (no OT, no psychotherapy group, nobody allowed to use the gym) was, except for Monday mornings when a ward meeting was held, were just an excuse for all the staff to congregate in the office.
It was near the end of my stay in the hospital that I was asked to take part in the group psychology session. Four patients, including myself, one of the nurses, the ward psychologist (who is the psychologist that I see for psychotherapy now) and his trainee were sat in a room with the aim of doing some talking. The other three patients had been present at the group session the previous week so the had done all the introductory stuff and their input was to talk about how things had been since that last session. I, however, was new to this and I was expected to do a bit more talking, which somewhat surprisingly I did, about why I was in hospital and about how long I had suffered from depression. After having done this, the psychologist asked if there was anything else that we wanted to talk about, or to raise for the group to discuss.
I'm not sure how it happened because I am not naturally someone who would speak up in these circumstances, but I found myself talking about how little interaction had taken place between me and the nurses. I said that I had been in hospital for nearly a month and during that time only two nurses had taken the time to actually sit down and talk with me, to find out whether there was anything that they could do for me, and to generally put me at my ease. I questioned the point of the hour of protected time in the morning if the nurses were just going to sit in the office as they did for the rest of the day and ignore the patients. At this point, the other patients at the session also joined in and made similar comments all of which left the nurse, who had decided to come to the session to see what went on, somewhat red-faced.
I think that what I said struck home because the next day on the stroke of 11am, the office emptied and the nurses went in search of a patient with whom they could interact. This practice continued after I had left the ward, but I would question whether they have gone back to their bad habits now we are a few more months down the line.
Conclusions
It is important that anyone reading this should recognize that the views expressed here are my own based on my experience of a month in a mental hospital. I don't wish to offend anyone but I am telling it how it was in the hospital that I was in; I am sure that things are not as bad everywhere, and it is possible that there may be some hospitals that are even worse.
I have been on surgical wards with as many patients as there were in the wards in the mental hospital that I was in, which operated with a similar number of nurses, where the patients were not as mobile as they tend to be in a mental hospital, and yet where I would have regular periods of interaction with the nurses. And on the surgical ward the nurses had to do proper nursing things like changing dressings and helping the patients with their ablutions. So why do mental nurses consistently fail to interact with the patients?
One thing that concerned me greatly was the number of coloured nurses on the ward and the difference in their attitudes to the coloured patients and those who were white. It is bad enough to suffer discrimination because you have a mental illness, it is appalling when the discrimination is actually being shown by the people who are supposed to be helping you, not only because you have a mental illness but also because you are white. Another bad practice that was common among a particular group of nurses was their having conversations in front of the patients in a foreign language. The Nigerian staff were the offenders here, breaking Mental Health Trust policy by so doing.
I found, and have mentioned this in various of the posts in this series, that the nurses seemed to have little respect for the consultant psychiatrists and had no qualms about contradicting their (the consultant's) decisions or arguing with the consultants over what had been said. To have done this is bad enough, to have done it in front of a patient is unprofessional.
So all in all, I do not have a high opinion of the mental nurses (and care support workers) that I came in contact with. Yes, there were a few very good nurses and I was thankful when they were on duty, but the majority of them left a lot to be desired. I was left with the feeling of being discriminated against because I was not schizophrenic or a drug addict, because I was white, and as another patient said of me, because I was probably more intelligent than most of them.
To be continued.
The people that patients have most interaction with while in hospital (apart from other patients) are the nurses. Although in these days of tight budgets the number of nurses on a ward is supplemented with the addition of unqualified staff and in the hospital that I was in these members of staff are known as Care Support Workers. When in an ordinary hospital you have a reasonable idea of who is staff (they wear a uniform) and who is a patient (they will generally be lying in a bed or wearing night clothes and a dressing gown. In a mental hospital it is often far more difficult to make the differentiation. The nurses don't wear uniform and the patients are usually wearing normal every day clothes.
The funny side of all this is that on more than one occasion I had both patients and staff speak to me thinking that I was a member of staff. I'm not sure why this should have happened; whether it was because I didn't look like a mental patient or because I looked as though I knew what I was doing, I'm not sure.
This post will be broken down into several sections and cover areas and say things that I am sure may be upsetting to some mental nurses. Any criticisms that I make are directed at the staff that I had interaction with during my stay in hospital and not to all mental nurses, so those professionals who read this please do not think too harshly of me for I am only reporting it as it was during my incarceration.
Named Nurses
Okay, we all know about named nurses. They are the one's who you can go to when you have problems and they are supposed to be your first port of call if you are having problems. That's fine if the nurses work some sort of regular shifts, but the nurses on the two wards that I was on seemed to work a fair amount of double shifts so you would see a nurse for a couple of days and then you might well not see them again during your stay on the ward. On the first ward I was on I was assigned a male nurse 'M' as my named nurse and I can report that at no time while I was on the ward, and he worked at least four of the eight days that I was on the ward, did he ever introduce himself to me or even talk to me. This defeats the object of having a named nurse, doesn't it?
On the second ward that I was on, my named nurse introduced herself to me on my second day on the ward, and then told me that she was going to be off for the next week. At no time during my three weeks on the ward did she make any effort to actually talk to me, and I am afraid that I have to say that she was the nurse who ran around like a headless chicken when I had my angina attack and wouldn't give me my GTN spray until she had found a second nurse to be with her while she opened the drug trolley.
As far as I can see the named nurse is a good idea in theory but it is rarely going to work properly because of shift patterns and the fact that the nurses rarely seem to leave the office.
The Office
From reading other blogs it is apparent that those of us who have been inpatients in a mental hospital all have the same opinion that the nurses spend far too much time in the office writing reports about the patients and nowhere near enough time actually interacting with the patients that they are writing reports on.
My first ward had a large office that was big enough for most of the nurses and care support workers to spend much of their shift in there. Sometimes the only member of staff who was not in the office was the one going round doing the hourly checks on where the patients were. the office on the second ward I was on wasn't large enough to swing a cat in and yet at most times of the day all the members of staff would be locked away in there except for the person going round the ward doing the hourly checks and the person sat outside the office keeping an eye on one of the patients, J.
J would walk up and down the main corridor of the ward for hours. She wasn't allowed any leave and rarely had visitors; the only time that she left the ward was to go to the meeting room where ward rounds were held. J also ate constantly if she could get her hands on food. Any food. She would go into the kitchen area and take handfuls of sugar and eat it. The result was that the staff stopped putting sugar out for us to use in hot drinks except in sachets. this didn't stop J, because she would just take a handful of them and eat the sugar, throwing the packets down wherever she happened to be at the time. She would also take the little containers of jam, marmalade and honey that we had at breakfast and supper by the handful and lick the contents out of the containers while walking up and down the corridor. All that the staff ever did was to tell her not to eat the sugar or the jam. She was not told to pick up the rubbish that she would leave lying around. It was the patients who decided that something needed to be done because we were sick of finding half-eaten containers of jam in the box in which the jam and butter were stored. By watching J, and every time she threw rubbish on the floor or put empty containers anywhere other than in the bin, one of the patients would tell her to pick up the rubbish and put it in the bin, likewise with the jam containers. After a week or so of this J started to put the rubbish in the bin automatically. Because the staff spoke to her in such weak tones, and the patients used authoritative voices as one would with a naughty child, so J learnt what was acceptable and what was not. If the member of staff who was assigned to watch her walk up and down the corridor for hours during the day had been used to engage her in some meaningful activity then I am sure that it would not have been long before it was no longer necessary to have a member of staff monitoring her all the time.
My question is, why do so many of the staff need to spend so much time in the office ostensibly writing reports on the patients? Because they spend so much time in there and so little time with the patients, anything that they write must be a fairytale anyway.
Protected Time
Protected times are something that seem to exist in all mental hospitals. They are useful because it means that certain things can be done on the ward without unnecessary people (and that does include visitors) being around. This means that mealtimes were protected times and each morning the hour between 11am and midday, was protected time. There were notices to this effect at the entrance to the wards and they made it quite clear that the hour of protected time before lunch was for the nurses and patients to interact.
The problem was that this never seemed to happen. This hour each morning when nothing was happening (no OT, no psychotherapy group, nobody allowed to use the gym) was, except for Monday mornings when a ward meeting was held, were just an excuse for all the staff to congregate in the office.
It was near the end of my stay in the hospital that I was asked to take part in the group psychology session. Four patients, including myself, one of the nurses, the ward psychologist (who is the psychologist that I see for psychotherapy now) and his trainee were sat in a room with the aim of doing some talking. The other three patients had been present at the group session the previous week so the had done all the introductory stuff and their input was to talk about how things had been since that last session. I, however, was new to this and I was expected to do a bit more talking, which somewhat surprisingly I did, about why I was in hospital and about how long I had suffered from depression. After having done this, the psychologist asked if there was anything else that we wanted to talk about, or to raise for the group to discuss.
I'm not sure how it happened because I am not naturally someone who would speak up in these circumstances, but I found myself talking about how little interaction had taken place between me and the nurses. I said that I had been in hospital for nearly a month and during that time only two nurses had taken the time to actually sit down and talk with me, to find out whether there was anything that they could do for me, and to generally put me at my ease. I questioned the point of the hour of protected time in the morning if the nurses were just going to sit in the office as they did for the rest of the day and ignore the patients. At this point, the other patients at the session also joined in and made similar comments all of which left the nurse, who had decided to come to the session to see what went on, somewhat red-faced.
I think that what I said struck home because the next day on the stroke of 11am, the office emptied and the nurses went in search of a patient with whom they could interact. This practice continued after I had left the ward, but I would question whether they have gone back to their bad habits now we are a few more months down the line.
Conclusions
It is important that anyone reading this should recognize that the views expressed here are my own based on my experience of a month in a mental hospital. I don't wish to offend anyone but I am telling it how it was in the hospital that I was in; I am sure that things are not as bad everywhere, and it is possible that there may be some hospitals that are even worse.
I have been on surgical wards with as many patients as there were in the wards in the mental hospital that I was in, which operated with a similar number of nurses, where the patients were not as mobile as they tend to be in a mental hospital, and yet where I would have regular periods of interaction with the nurses. And on the surgical ward the nurses had to do proper nursing things like changing dressings and helping the patients with their ablutions. So why do mental nurses consistently fail to interact with the patients?
One thing that concerned me greatly was the number of coloured nurses on the ward and the difference in their attitudes to the coloured patients and those who were white. It is bad enough to suffer discrimination because you have a mental illness, it is appalling when the discrimination is actually being shown by the people who are supposed to be helping you, not only because you have a mental illness but also because you are white. Another bad practice that was common among a particular group of nurses was their having conversations in front of the patients in a foreign language. The Nigerian staff were the offenders here, breaking Mental Health Trust policy by so doing.
I found, and have mentioned this in various of the posts in this series, that the nurses seemed to have little respect for the consultant psychiatrists and had no qualms about contradicting their (the consultant's) decisions or arguing with the consultants over what had been said. To have done this is bad enough, to have done it in front of a patient is unprofessional.
So all in all, I do not have a high opinion of the mental nurses (and care support workers) that I came in contact with. Yes, there were a few very good nurses and I was thankful when they were on duty, but the majority of them left a lot to be desired. I was left with the feeling of being discriminated against because I was not schizophrenic or a drug addict, because I was white, and as another patient said of me, because I was probably more intelligent than most of them.
To be continued.
Thursday, 13 November 2008
It Really Isn't Fair
I should be on a bit of a high this morning after achieving a minor triumph in front of an audience of doctors, but this will have to wait for another post. Instead I have found myself wanting, perhaps needing would be a better description, to write on an entirely different subject. It is a subject that most of us with mental health problems feel very strongly about and we are not alone because the people that we need to be able to have access to also feel as we do. The subject is the poor level of mental health services in this country. The reason that I find myself writing this post is because I have, this morning, read the latest post from Hannah at Coloured Mind. I urge you to read it for I am sure that you, too, will be moved.
The level of support is not poor because of the calibre of the people who are employed in this area. The problem is that there really are not enough facilities and staff there to support the number of people who require to use them. There truly is a lottery for access to whatever services are available for we are left to fend for ourselves until our number is pulled out of the hat. That is not to say that we don't get support from our GPs, because in most cases the support that we receive is superb, but GPs have neither the time nor, in most cases, the expertise to give us the help that we require.
I am sure that Hannah's story is not unique. When she lived at home she got the help that she needed, but having moved to university in Manchester she has found herself back in the pot waiting for her number to come up again. This sort of thing would not happen if she had cancer, so why should it because her problems relate to her mental health? Perhaps the reason is that mental illness is invisible. You wear no plaster cast, you don't need crutches or a wheelchair to get about, very often you appear completely normal to those around you. But what others cannot see, and if they have never suffered from mental illness themselves cannot understand, is the turmoil that goes on inside you.
If just a small percentage of the money that has so far been spent on Connecting for Health, the infamous computer system that the government is intent on forcing on us, had been spent on mental health services, then the long waiting periods that we have to endure to be seen by a psychiatrist, to be assessed for and offered psychotherapy, or to get any of the other services that we require, could be reduced to the time (from referral to treatment) that is now being heralded as what we can expect as the norm within the rest of the NHS.
There is a huge campaign being waged by the government at the present time to reduce the discrimination that mental health sufferers experience in the work place, and yet it is the very fact that we do not get the treament and support that we require that marks us out as different and leads to much of that discrimination. By ensuring that we have access to the specialists who can diagnose our problems, implement, monitor and adjust drug regimes that enable us to operate at a level that means that we can study or work at a normal level, and recommend the additional treatment and services that will make our lives more bearable, we would probably be able to exist in a manner that would put us on a level playing field with the rest of the population.
Is this too much to ask? I don't think so and I believe that it is about time that we were treated more fairly so that we can enjoy something approaching a normal life.
The level of support is not poor because of the calibre of the people who are employed in this area. The problem is that there really are not enough facilities and staff there to support the number of people who require to use them. There truly is a lottery for access to whatever services are available for we are left to fend for ourselves until our number is pulled out of the hat. That is not to say that we don't get support from our GPs, because in most cases the support that we receive is superb, but GPs have neither the time nor, in most cases, the expertise to give us the help that we require.
I am sure that Hannah's story is not unique. When she lived at home she got the help that she needed, but having moved to university in Manchester she has found herself back in the pot waiting for her number to come up again. This sort of thing would not happen if she had cancer, so why should it because her problems relate to her mental health? Perhaps the reason is that mental illness is invisible. You wear no plaster cast, you don't need crutches or a wheelchair to get about, very often you appear completely normal to those around you. But what others cannot see, and if they have never suffered from mental illness themselves cannot understand, is the turmoil that goes on inside you.
If just a small percentage of the money that has so far been spent on Connecting for Health, the infamous computer system that the government is intent on forcing on us, had been spent on mental health services, then the long waiting periods that we have to endure to be seen by a psychiatrist, to be assessed for and offered psychotherapy, or to get any of the other services that we require, could be reduced to the time (from referral to treatment) that is now being heralded as what we can expect as the norm within the rest of the NHS.
There is a huge campaign being waged by the government at the present time to reduce the discrimination that mental health sufferers experience in the work place, and yet it is the very fact that we do not get the treament and support that we require that marks us out as different and leads to much of that discrimination. By ensuring that we have access to the specialists who can diagnose our problems, implement, monitor and adjust drug regimes that enable us to operate at a level that means that we can study or work at a normal level, and recommend the additional treatment and services that will make our lives more bearable, we would probably be able to exist in a manner that would put us on a level playing field with the rest of the population.
Is this too much to ask? I don't think so and I believe that it is about time that we were treated more fairly so that we can enjoy something approaching a normal life.
Monday, 13 October 2008
Why I Didn't Write Something For World Mental Health Day
I've been a bit slack as far as posting to the blog has been concerned over the last couple of weeks. I'd like to think that it is because I haven't been able to think of anything to say, but really it's more a case of my knitting taking over. I'm trying to get my jumper ready as quickly as possible so that I have it to wear when the really cold weather comes.
I have, in fact, started to write posts several times during the last week or two, but I have ended up deleting them because I felt that they were too controversial. One of these was a post for World Mental Health Day, last Friday. I still want to write a post covering the subject that I had selected, but I will have to think about it a bit more before I actually publish it.
You may wonder what it is about the post that has made me so reluctant to publish, especially as I make no secret of the fact that I suffer from mental illness and abhor the stigma that is associated with it and the discrimination that people such as myself suffer. The problem was that I was querying the amount of money that is spent by the NHS on very expensive drugs that may help to prolong the life of someone with terminal cancer for only a few months, when that money could be used to more effect if channelled into the care and treatment of those with mental health problems.
I have determined that I will still write on the subject, but before I do I am going to do a bit more research. I know that I will still end up upsetting some people; however, this is something that I feel strongly about, and unless those of us who are able to, speak about the problems that mental illness causes, we will never receive the treatment that we deserve.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Mental Illness and Discrimination
Late last night I was sitting watching the end of the film on BBC1 when a public information film came on. I didn't pay too much attention to it to start with, but then a number of words seem to attack my consciousness and my attention was drawn to see what its message was.
It showed a scene in a hospital, probably an A&E department (but as I said I wasn't really watching to start with) and the voiceover was talking about the qualities needed, and those not acceptable, for employment, presumably in the hospital. Anyway the voiceover continued and said something about 'not suffering frequent bouts of depression' and I guess it was this that had attracted my attention, because as the medical team were fighting to start the patient's heart the voiceover continued, 'Congratulations you have just turned down Florence Nightingale'.
The final message was from the government telling employers not to discriminate against people with mental illness, particularly depression.
I suffered terrible discrimination and lack of understanding about my depression when I was working, and it was this that eventually led me to become so anxious and depressed that work became impossible. I lost all confidence in my ability to do a job that I loved, and for which I was well qualified and exceptionally capable. In the end I had to seek early retirement on the grounds of ill-health. The loss of self-esteem that resulted from me being placed in this position, and my continuing lack of confidence in myself to do even some quite simple things, mean that I am still too afraid to even attempt to find myself a part-time job. I worry about what I am qualified to do, and what I would do if I was put into a situation that I couldn't cope with.
Two things about this film struck a chord. The first was that such a film should be shown so late at night, in fact in the early hours of the morning, and the second was the message that the government were trying to get across.
Why did the second thing strike such a chord? Well, I was employed by the Ministry of Defence, so it could be said that I worked for the government. I really wish they would practice what they preach.
It showed a scene in a hospital, probably an A&E department (but as I said I wasn't really watching to start with) and the voiceover was talking about the qualities needed, and those not acceptable, for employment, presumably in the hospital. Anyway the voiceover continued and said something about 'not suffering frequent bouts of depression' and I guess it was this that had attracted my attention, because as the medical team were fighting to start the patient's heart the voiceover continued, 'Congratulations you have just turned down Florence Nightingale'.
The final message was from the government telling employers not to discriminate against people with mental illness, particularly depression.
I suffered terrible discrimination and lack of understanding about my depression when I was working, and it was this that eventually led me to become so anxious and depressed that work became impossible. I lost all confidence in my ability to do a job that I loved, and for which I was well qualified and exceptionally capable. In the end I had to seek early retirement on the grounds of ill-health. The loss of self-esteem that resulted from me being placed in this position, and my continuing lack of confidence in myself to do even some quite simple things, mean that I am still too afraid to even attempt to find myself a part-time job. I worry about what I am qualified to do, and what I would do if I was put into a situation that I couldn't cope with.
Two things about this film struck a chord. The first was that such a film should be shown so late at night, in fact in the early hours of the morning, and the second was the message that the government were trying to get across.
Why did the second thing strike such a chord? Well, I was employed by the Ministry of Defence, so it could be said that I worked for the government. I really wish they would practice what they preach.
Monday, 21 July 2008
What A Coincidence
When I wrote this I had not read this or this.
It seems that by sheer coincidence I have said the same thing as a lot of other people.
It's a shame that in this day and age that those with mental health problems are having to face such awful discrimination. It means that as a group, mental health sufferers are more likely to suffer discrimination than any other minority. What a terrible state of affairs in the 21st century!
It seems that by sheer coincidence I have said the same thing as a lot of other people.
It's a shame that in this day and age that those with mental health problems are having to face such awful discrimination. It means that as a group, mental health sufferers are more likely to suffer discrimination than any other minority. What a terrible state of affairs in the 21st century!
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