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Becoming a Mental Health Nurse

It’s over!!! …

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I’m on ‘holiday’ right now and wow, it’s all over! No, not my course but the taught component.  It’s took a while coming and then bang, it happened, my last ever lecture for the course – a lecture on critical analysis for the nursing dissertation took place last week.  How do I feel? Elated? Nope, surprised is more like it!  I hadn’t even realized this milestone had crept up until a colleague mentioned it and gave me pause for thought.  Now I’ve got to get down to it and deliver two pieces of work in the new year!

So what’s left?  I’ve got an essay on management and my dissertation to hand in, one for March and the other for May.  It’s off to simulated practice for a fortnight in January – this as its name suggests is a simulation of what we face on the wards and a refresh of clinical skills.  It also serves as a preparation for the final objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) which this year revolves around teaching skills to a first year student.  And there’s twenty-two weeks of placement – 10 weeks in A&E with the Royal London RAID team and 12 weeks in a placement still to be determined but hoping it will be PICU (an area I haven’t done a placement in as yet).

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I want to talk about ECT, electroconvulsive therapy.  For those who have not heard of this form of treatment you may have heard of it crudely mentioned as “electric shock” therapy or been referred to “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”.  In my long distant ‘youth’, my understanding of mental health and illness was defined by the 1975 movie,”One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”.  (Spoiler alert – if you want to watch the movie) Two things have always stood out for me from this movie Nurse Ratched (who is overbearing and imposes her values and views on her patients, lacks compassion and empathy and causes the suicide of one of her charges) and ECT (turning Jack Nicholson’s character into a drooling wreck).  It is only recently that I learnt that Nicholson’s character wasn’t affected by the ECT but rather had a lobotomy which is what left him the ‘drooling wreck’.

Becoming a mental health nursing student and undertaking my placements has shown me that there is no role for Nurse Ratched’s in this profession.  Yes, I have come across the occasional person who aspires to be her but overwhelmingly staff are supportive of service users and often go the extra mile to get people well and resuming their lives.  Thus destroying this stereotype in my mind!  However, my views that ECT leaves people as gibbering wrecks remained until recently.  So what is this ECT thing?  In a nut shell it revolves around sending a small electrical charge through the brain which causes an epileptic seizure.

ECT was what mental health was about between the late 1930s through to the 1970s where it was used for a variety of mental illnesses but especially depression.  Thereafter we see it decreasing as a primary treatment option and the emergence of medications.  Over time clinical evidence suggests greater efficacy of positive outcomes with medications and overall there has been a decline of ECT to the extent that it is rarely used.  So why is ECT still being used?  These days ECT is used as a tool of last resort, NICE (2009) guidance sets out “ECT should only be used for the treatment of severe depressive illness, a prolonged or severe episode of mania, or catatonia…” Having seen it in ‘action’ it is not a pleasant experience to witness but it does provide the service user with an ability to resume their lives in a scenario where this has failed through other routes.  And again a lot of this ‘success’ rests with the professionalism of the staff undertaking these procedures.

This is it for this year, so have a wonderful time and we’ll catch up in the new year!

About Raymond

I'm one of those "mature" students who is giving this education "thing" another go through the medium of Mental Health Nursing. It's been a roller-coaster ride but well worth it! Read and enjoy ... View all posts by Raymond →

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