It isn’t just violence that saps our spirits. No, it’s also the demoralisation we all feel having our hands tied behind our backs by management, quangos and international bodies like the WHO.
I was on duty when a worthless, sectioned wretch, a PD without a drop of mental illness, had been insulting, abusing (*), humiliating and degrading the female staff on duty, all day long. He was receiving orgasmic levels of joy and gratification from making those women’s lives a misery. Shut your eyes and try to imagine even a fraction of the verbal, sexual humiliation and threats this antisocial and sadistic PD subjected those women to all day. I watched them have to go off on their breaks in tears and then having to come back for some more. Now imagine it was your daughter or wife. These women were somebody’s wife and daughter, going home crying and not wanting to go to work the next day. How come? Because a bunch of spineless suits, hiding behind their desks, wrote policies demanding he receive least restrictive ‘care.’ Not only that but HR and management policed those policies with a viciousness the Gestapo would have been proud of.
The hospital wasn’t providing a drop of care to this worthless parasite, only indulgence and absolution. He was stealing a precious mental hospital bed from a real, deserving patient. His personality disorders were not being treated or addressed. It would actually have been beneficial for the wretch, both short-term and for when he left hospital, to have been taught self-control, reflection, respect for women and so on. I have both done it and seen it done. It’s perfectly possible, but not under current conditions. This is the way I handled it (it was me who drove it). I had to wait until his entitlement grew too big for his boots, he thought he was utterly untouchable and started threatening a patient with actual violence. That meant I could lock him up. Do you know, all his bravado and threats evaporated when I took hold of him. At least it spared those women for a few hours. I daresay a manager insisted he was unlocked the next day.
You see, there are no legal or institutional consequences for violent patients. There weren’t any in my day either but we had our own, informal methods of discouraging violence. Maybe I’ll tell you about some of them as I go along.
It’s complicated to show you how things were changed, bit by bit, to get UK mental hospitals to this dreadful state, and I intend to show you.
(*) On this hospital’s laughable MVA course, they spent a couple of hours listing ten categories of abuse patients may suffer; including psychological abuse, neglect, and, wait for it, they’ve invented a new one – institutional abuse (*). Staff receive only token protection from these forms of abuse – its how the ECHR is structured, it’s a vehicle for legal action against organisations, not individuals. If those female staff weren’t suffering institutional abuse, as the direct result of that hospital’s least restrictive policies, then I guess it must mean that words only mean what HR and lawyers say they mean.
*) And launch, via their expensively remunerated ambulance chaser, a compensation claim. Ker-ching.
Britain cannot return to being a high-trust, high wage cohesive society with world class, high quality public services suitable for a first world nation if –
a) not enough young people want to become mental nurses,
b) if those who are tricked into training leave soon after completing it,
c) if enough of those who stay, with a massive student loan around their necks decide to climb the promotion ladder as soon as possible (without gaining the judgment, knowledge, experience, or trust of the staff now below them).
Same as all the other nursing specialties, we used to be an essential part of the glue holding a functioning society together. And now we’re not.
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