The Mental Health Workers Guide

Buy the entire series in Ebook format here

One of my projects for 2012 is a series of video presentations outlining many of the principles of social care work for people with mental health difficulties. This is because I feel very strongly that workers in health and social care often find themselves effectively abandoned by over-stretched statutory services who are unable to provide the necessary input to help them fulfil their roles properly.

This is a great shame because many of the unsung mental health workers I come across are capable of extremely sophisticated work if only they had the necessary support. This free series is my attempt to redress the balance a little and ‘fill the gap’.

The project will be developed in instalments (roughly once a week) and is expected to take the whole of 2012 to complete. Each instalment will appear here but the entire, developing series can be accessed via The Guide page here at www.thecareguy.com The different instalments will be:

• Introduction: What’s a support worker worth movie and transcript
• The problem with specialisation
• The biological (medical), social, and stress & vulnerability models movie and transcript
• The importance of physiology movie and transcript
• The meaning of psychiatric diagnoses movie and transcript
• Anxiety movie and transcript
• The psychology of anxiety movie and transcript
• Depression movie and transcript
• The psychology of depression movie and transcript
• Psychosis (Hallucinations) movie and transcript
• Psychosis (Delusions part 1) movie and transcript
• Psychosis (Delusions part 2) movie and transcript
• Psychosis (Thought disorders) movie and transcript
• The dementias
• Orientation, memory & delirium
• Working with the limbic system
• Personality disorder
• High Expressed Emotion (HEE)
• Sympathy is not usually helpful
• Stress & vulnerability
• The ‘invalidating environment’
• Self fulfilling prophecy
• The meaning of recovery
• The three types of recovery
• Duty of care: A slug in a bottle
• Hanged if you do & hanged if you don’t – a duty of care myth
• There is no ‘us and them’
• People are just people
• People do the best they can with what they’ve got
• Coping skills develop slowly
• Do as I do – model behaviours we want to encourage in others
• Lapse and relapse – two different things
• Don’t expect your service user to perform perfectly. You don’t so why should they?
• Don’t blame people with disorders for behaving like people with disorders
• The word ‘support’ is meaningless in and of itself
• “It’s just behavioural” – a workers’ excuse for lazy thinking about service users’ needs.
• Seek first to understand
• Challenging behaviour means….
• Different types of challenging behaviour
• Do we need help?
• Consequence, learned behaviour and the need for boundaries
• The whole team approach
• Expectations
• Don’t blame people with disorders for behaving like people with disorders
• Deliberate self harm
• Responding to a person who harms themselves
• Risk-free is impossible. Manageable risk is the way to go
• Don’t flap
• The saviour fantasy
• You’re probably not an emergency service – don’t try to behave like one
• Unhelpful thinking
• Socratic dialogue and ‘the razors’.
• Selective abstraction (the downward arrow)
• The sticks we use to beat ourselves
• Beat past trauma with new, positive memories
• Who put us in charge?
• Final thoughts