As promised, here are the answers to the initial questionnaire. Let me know how you did in the comments.
Picture on the box 2.2: Answers
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The picture on the box
Many years ago, back when Adam first met Eve and a good Saturday night out involved hunting dinosaurs on the High street, I enrolled as a student nurse. To say the course was bewildering at times would be an understatement. I found myself learning all sorts of disparate facts and principles but I had real trouble making sense of how they all might fit together. What I needed was an overview: a way to make sense of it all. I needed ‘the picture on the box’ to help me complete the jigsaw of mental health nurse training. Unfortunately no such overview existed. That’s why I’ve developed my own. This series of videos won’t make anyone an expert but it will give you the basic grounding you need to make sense of further learning.
Therapeutic risk-taking
Without risk life becomes meaningless. Our whole quality of life depends upon a balance between risk and reward. This is as true for our patients and service-users as it is for us.
Genuinely helpful care must involve positive, therapeutic risk-taking.
Meaningful activity and happiness
If you want to find happiness or even contentment do something that you define as more important than yourself.
Remember: Happiness comes from what we do, not from what we’ve got!
Rights and mental health
It is not the task of mental health workers to take away another person’s individuality.
Responding to self harm
Much of the stigma around self harm comes from the many myths and misconceptions that abound among professionals and the public alike about the reasons behind Self Harm. I remember as a student nurse in the early 1990s being fed these same myths by nursing and medical staff. The failure to see past our own perceived importance as professional ‘experts’ was rife and it led to some extremely damaging and cruel approaches to people who harm themselves.
Let’s look at some of the more common misconceptions. Perhaps one of the most common myths is to do with the notion of the ‘cry for help’. The idea is that by cutting or otherwise injuring themselves clients are trying to get some sort of assistance from services. If this is true then as professionals working in the field we need to ask ourselves some very difficult questions such as……
Do people really not know how to ask for help? If not – why not?
What sort of help can I offer them that is worth self-mutilation?
Am I really that special?
How good am I at noticing people’s distress if they need to resort to self-harm to get my attention?
What’s wrong with our access policies? How good are my listening skills?
How ‘accessible’ am I if people can’t just talk to me and ask for what they want?
What does this say about me as a professional and as a person?
Another myth is that self-harm is an attempt to manipulate or emotionally blackmail professionals.
Do we really believe ourselves to be so important that people will mutilate themselves just to influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours?
Is self-harm really all about us as professionals or is it more to do with the personal needs of the client? Then there is the good old ‘attention seeking’ myth. It doesn’t take a genius to work out how inaccurate such an assumption is likely to be when we understand that the vast majority of self-harm is done secretly and in private.
Contrary to popular belief, deliberate self-harm is not usually an attempt to manipulate others. Nor is it usually a ‘cry for help’. Most people are quite able to ask for help without self-harming and the secrecy that often accompanies self-harm demonstrates that something else is going on.
Duty of care summary poster
Many people are confused about the exact nature of their Duty of Care toward the people they look after. To a large extent this is because they think that they are somehow accountable for the actions of other people (in this case the client or service-user). This makes people think they are:
Hanged if they do
and
Hanged if they don’t
In reality, you are responsible only for what you do, not for what your client does. If you do all that you LEGALLY can to minimise risk, to help them to make decisions in their best interests and to help them cope effectively then you have fulfilled your duty of care… whatever the outcome might be.
- You are not responsible for someone else’s behaviour.
- You are responsible for your own behaviour in the situation in which you find yourself (including acting to keep yourself and others safe when necessary).
- You are not expected to take away people’s legitimate rights to choose if they are able to.
- You won’t be prosecuted for not breaking the law.
- Care workers are judged upon process – not upon outcome.
However there really is a ‘do’ and there really is a ‘don’t’…
Do all that you reasonably can
Don’t break the law.