Why am I doing this?
Because someone needs to. Because I couldn’t go to my deathbed (a long way off yet, may it please the Lord) without speaking out and condemning the blinkered, negligent, reckless, corrupt, pocket lining, wilful destruction of something Britain had that was so good and positive and healing.
Because, so far as I can see, no-one else is doing it.
Because I can be a bristly, difficult to manage, anti-authoritarian, management detesting old curmudgeon and curiously my obstinacy has opened doors and ears and let me see things they didn’t want a grunt like me seeing.
Because I want to be the voice crying out in the wilderness, the man responding, ‘Here I am Lord, send me.’ Because, as JFK challenged, ‘If not you, who?’
A bit of OSMN history
A while ago, I wrote a book ‘Why Britain is ruined beyond repair.’ WBIRBR didn’t begin life as a book. I had no intention of writing a book or any idea how to. No, it was a way of proving or disproving … tell you what, I’ll just clip a quote from the preface.
‘Somewhere in the early 2000s I became aware of an uncomfortable feeling, not yet a fear, that something was going badly wrong with my country, that all of the progress Britain had made since WWII in building a safe, prosperous, lawful country and culture that held a place for everyone was secretly being dismantled by a hundred separate, hidden movements, initiatives and other drivers that don’t even have names. I didn’t like where I thought this would end up.
Much of my disquiet was initially felt at work, a result of my own and my colleagues’ nursing care being diluted, wasted, choked or forbidden by the creeping power of targets, political correctness, rescuing and other forces I only came to recognise later on.
I couldn’t ignore this. I was driven to discover if my feeling was caused only by the dramatic way the media presented the news, was a personal prejudice against being managed by clowns or was real. I did find something and then I had to first understand exactly what, why where, how and when what I’d found was and then set it down so that I and others could understand and look more closely at it. ‘Why Britain is ruined beyond repair’ is the result of that approach, investigation and findings.’ And so will this blog be.
A little introduction to OSMN
I’ve worked front line mental nursing for well over thirty-five years and that alone allows me to say I know what I’m talking about. Read on, you’ll find plenty more reasons. I’ve saved lives – just by keeping quiet and listening, or finding the right words to help patients open up and tell their story. I’ve sat for hours with patients too depressed to eat or speak, patients who were at the lowest point in their lives. Mental nursing is one of the few jobs you can be the difference between life and death. I’ve also saved lives by cutting ligatures from necks, stripping bedrooms of anything else they could tie up their necks with, by watching patients through the night, making them sleep with their hands on top of the sheet.
And as part of a bigger team I’ve helped save patients’ lives – patients who were living on planet mad as a hatter, who were sectioned, admitted and medicated and only then started to recover. Patients who didn’t know they’d been suffering a major depressive disorder – sometimes for more than a year. Patients who’ve suffered a childhood full of such abuse you’d be demanding hanging be brought back if you only knew half of what had been done to them. I’ve restrained hundreds and locked plenty of those up. I’ve taken plenty of punches too.
I’ve given thousands of jabs, seen fads come, go and come back again. Smattered among the genuinely ill patients have been far too many time-wasters, bed-wasters, criminals, farked in-the-personality… well, I’ll get to them in due course.
I’ve seen violence and self-harm that would turn members-of-the-public’s hair white. I’ve worked alongside nurses and HCAs I’d be proud to be mentioned in the same breath as, staff who are brave, principled, generous, forgiving, self-sacrificing, as patient as the hills. Some of them have been falsely accused, vilified, disciplined etc by the lowest form of life I’ve come across on this planet – NHS managers. (Well, maybe there were a handful of paedophile and psychopathic patients slightly lower). I’m going to tell you about all of the above and more.
And I still believe in the job and the good I can do. Good that I couldn’t do if I was a social worker or psychologist. In fact, good that I wouldn’t be allowed to do if I was a social worker or psychologist.
I’m grateful I haven’t become a cynical, bitter old charge. I saw plenty of good people succumb to that (and some who were never good to start with). The job can do that to you. Patients and managers can magnify it.
Every year I worked, I got better at my job, learning and teaching, testing and checking new ideas, research and insights as I went along. Disobediently, as it turns out. I was nursing and teaching in the old-school ways that our courageous managers would love to eradicate and be rewarded for so doing.
Mental nursing (as well as psychiatry, the NHS, and a lot more) is heading full tilt for the cliff edge. I can’t see anything around with the power, stones and vision to slam the brakes on in time. So maybe I’m just chronicling how good it was, how bad it became and how we got there. But if mental nursing does get the chance to turn around, we could do worse than follow this blueprint.
Who’s my audience?
They say you should have your ideal reader in your mind as you write and address it to that imaginary individual. That may not be possible because –
Is my ideal reader a fellow disillusioned RMN (RNMH, SW, OT, HCA) reading because I’m expressing what s/he is seeing and feeling too?
Or is he an interested MOP – a patient, former patient, relative or spouse of a patient, victim of a patient?
Is she in a allied job, police, P.O., probation officer, doctor, teacher (as I used to devour Gadget’s and Nightjack’s posts) who’s seen her own service ruined and is interested in how it happens elsewhere.
Or is s/he one of the few remaining decent managers, civil servants, MPs, HR bods who despair at how bad it’s grown and wants to take action. I’m hoping there are some of those.
Or none of the above. So, sometimes what I write won’t be pitched at you but one of the others. If you’re already in the job you’ll probably roll your eyes as I state the bleeding obvious. I can’t see any way around this.
Respect to those who went before.
I know full well I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, men and women of courage, anonymous bloggers who told it how it really was in their jobs. Blogs like Inspector Gadget, Random acts of reality (which became Blood, Sweat and Tea) Nightjack, Frank Chalk, Jim Brown’s On Probation, Winston Smith’s Generation F, PC David Copperfield and more.