Psycho

Chapter One: Anticipation

"All nursing is about person-centred care, but this is especially true of mental health nursing. We manage, treat and care for patients anywhere: at home, in prison, in hospital ... even under a bridge in some busy city."

Your role is to build effective relationships with the people who use your services.Your focus is on supporting their recovery and enabling them to have more involvement and control over their conditions. You might help one person to take their medication correctly while advising another about relevant therapies or social activities.

Success comes from being able to establish these trusting relationships quickly, to help individuals understand their situation and get the best possible outcome.

You need to be aware of the legal context of your work and also be able to identify whether and when someone may be at risk of harming themselves or someone else.

What's the best thing about mental health nursing?

It is immensely rewarding to watch someone with a mental health condition start to rebuild their life with your support. The feeling of being able to make a real difference to somebody is just as satisfying whether they suffer from a mental or a physical illness.

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Scarlet Rose:

Every morning, at 6:00am, I have to get up. No days off or anything. Just constant work, from 8:00am - 8:00pm, 12 hours.

It was Monday morning. Every Monday, new in-mates are brought into Riversfield - who suffer from some form of mental/physical illness.

Mental health nursing is hard work - but it pays off in the end, seeing your client get better and better, soon they are a completely different person. A good one.

But there are the ones, who don't believe in themselves, they live or lived a very stressed and paranoid life. We - the nurses - tend to help them but they don't listen and just snap at us. I've never been hit or verbally abused by a patient, but I know nurses who have.

Some people in there are seriously psychotic, and most of the times isn't a lot we can do to help them, because they never let us.

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I got out of my warm double bed, and practically dragged my way to my cupboard, picking out my uniform that I should of laid out the night before as I usually do, which is a light blue coloured scrubs. In the institution - the uniforms are different colours, depending on the department you work in. So like me; the light blue scrubs are for helping and taking care of the mentally and/or physically illness people.

The green ones are simply the ones to clean the cells, the darker greened ones where the helpers of the green scrubs, the cleaners, so they'd get their equipment for them.

The purple ones were a whole new level, you'd have to have super big balls to work in that department - that was the one I most feared. The psychotic people. The ones who would try and kill themselves in their cell, the ones who wore a straight jacket, the ones who'd hit or back mouth the nurses. The nasty and terrifying people you'd come across.

I know I'm being negative towards then and that I should feel sorry for them because they don't actually mean it, they can't help themselves. But seriously, you'd be scared too.

I took my uniform out of my cupboard and got out a matching pair of red undergarments, and silently walked to the bathroom, trying my hardest not to wake up my room mate, Daniel. Even though he is dead sloppy and is thee most heaviest sleeper in the world. He could sleep through a fucking earthquake caused by the Devil.