Nurses at psychiatric unit called teens ‘pathetic’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2kg2djkk2o
Posted by topotaul
Nurses at psychiatric unit called teens ‘pathetic’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2kg2djkk2o
Posted by topotaul
25 Comments
From Magdalene Laundries to children’s homes and now this, why are kids, especially young girls treated so poorly?
The unit should be closed with immediate effect and all staff placed under police investigation. It won’t happen, obviously, but that’s how it should be done.
all of these people are still alive because of those nurses, it’s extremely hard to be committed so these would of all been extreme cases where they are a danger to themselves (and society cos no1 wants to witness someone jumping in front of a train ).
These people will also be extremely frustrating to deal with because you are trying to save their life, so it’s unsurprising that Nurses will lose their cool and say mean things.
Hard to judge when you’re only hearing from one side of this.
I have investigated allegations in mental health units more times than I can count. One young person remained adamant they had been mistreated when CCTV showed that the member of staff whose elbow made contact with her face had been punched 11 times by this young person with increasing force and was seeking to evade the attack. They were mentally unwell and as such, could only be the victim- anything they did to others must be excused, anything that happened that they disliked was an act of abuse or negligence.
I’m sure there will be truth in some of these allegations, I am also sure some of them will be far less straightforward.
I’m a psych nurse and I swear I have never mistreated a patient. Nor have I ever seen any other staff members mistreat anyone in two decades. No name calling either.
The majority of us would do anything to make our patients well and happy.
I really hope we don’t all get a bad name with stories like this.
We often get kicked, punched etc and I think the only time I ever hurt someone was by standing on their toe by accident.
It’s a hard job, horrific really. But we all live for those smiles a person does when they’re well again and going home.
From the thumbnail I thought that was Neil from The Young Ones
The use of sedatives as a convenience is illegal (hard to prove), the use of restraints and even dragging patients might or might not be, it depends on the context which happened. These hospitals can be quite a wall in a legal battle because they are basically the ones who assess themselves. To have a culture of prison guards ingrained to the staff mind is clearly a lack of judgement or complicity from the director doctor.
People here seem to be saying they don’t buy this, but idk it’s not out of reason. When I was still in school I wanted to go in to this sort of area and help people, so I did a placement at an NHS trust shadowing one of the doctors there and the level of indifference and contempt the people that worked there had for the patients was heartbreaking.
Not overt abuse or anything, at least that I saw, but the staff just didn’t seem to care anymore. There’d be a meeting with a patient and they’d talk about how they were doing with their issues, and the staff would act compassionate, but then you’d get out of there and out of earshot and then the staff would be talking about how full of shit they were and they didn’t care about themselves so why should they?
And that was over a decade ago, when things didn’t get cut to the bone by the Tories yet. The system itself must be hellish to work in no doubt, but it’s not beyond the pale to imagine that working there day in and day out can hollow you out.
Hard to take all these people both-sides-ing this seriously when you can speak to former patients all over the world and hear alarmingly similar stories.
This isn’t some kids making shit up. This is what happens when you disempower vulnerable people and then assume they are making shit up when they tell you the inevitable outcomes. People see that and realise that they can hurt these people and get away with it.
It is a known and documented thing that psychiatric units are rife with abuse and many come out worse than they went in.
As someone who has worked extensively in mental health hospitals, I’d say things like this are always *cultural*.
I’ve never seen full on staff abuse, but I’ve definitely seen the less empathetic and caring staff create cultures in certain wards that would enable behaviour like this with the wrong people.
A ward that fosters a doctrine of abuse will find itself with more and more abusers among the staff. The shits congregate together, while the people concerned about the behaviour leave as they refuse to work in those conditions with unpleasant people.
So why does this happen? It’s the complaints/whistleblowing side of things. The NHS complaints procedure- I can’t exaggerate this enough- is *utterly unfit for purpose*.
It is *designed* for the exhausted patient to be fucked around and gaslit so hard that they can no longer be bothered to stick up for themselves. NHS boards are fully allowed to just reply to complaints with PR language and do absolutely nothing to address their issues- it happens time and time again.
As for the whistleblowing, it’s just the same. Someone in my family was literally ‘sacked’ twice for whistleblowing. Both times the accused member of staff (who was 100% guilty) received preferential treatment and my family member was moved out of the office instead of them. Both of these complaints were about professional conduct so it wasn’t personal drama or anything.
Ultimately, the NHS has a bunch of directors and upper tier management who spend more of their day trying to avoid crisis than they actually do trying to improve anything. They institute a culture of silence by threatening the careers of those below them and every time the government brings in new measures to assist with whistleblowing, nothing changes.
In mental health specifically, the complaints process *does not work*. In reality, there is no objective standard for what counts as “acceptable” care in mental health and this is the main issue.
The lack of objectivity lets boards justify any abusive behaviours with any reason they would like, all without any real scrutiny. I’ve had experience of this myself and liaised with my MSP about it. By all accounts, the executive management of the board is a brick wall utterly devoid of any care about complaints and there is nothing to force accountability upon them.
If the government wants to seriously tackle abusive behaviour in mental health, it is the *complaints procedure* and ordinances for *accountability* that they need to address. Some patients will tell someone when they’re being abused, we just currently have a system designed to not even listen.
My partner’s mam recently retired after working as a nurse in a mental health hospital for decades. The amount of abuse they get from patients is absurd (the thing that pushed her to retirement was getting a fractured eye socket from being punched by a patient), I can imagine it’d take a very strong willed person to not be broken down by it over the years and becoming a bit jaded towards them.
Why were you even working there then if you had so much apathy for the patients you’re working with?
Edit:I feel so bad and sorry for those patients. What the nurses did to them was disgusting and they didn’t deserve that to happen to them.
Controversial opinion: Everyone has an empathy quota, it’s only human to mess up and make such a comment when you’ve made your last scrape of the barrel.
Controversialer opinion: Many mentally unhealthy people are too quick to rely entirely on external input, and even after guidance, push against helping themselves.
Controversialer opinion: Being ill, disabled, old, young, or of any non-‘normal’ situation does not give someone the excuse to self victimise or break the social contract of civil society.
You’ll have noticed that none of these opinions are actually controversial. Yet here we are, discussing yet another article that other-ises our nurses
My question is why didn’t they listen to the nurses in the first place? If they ate, they wouldn’t have had a tube shoved down their throat. Also in order to prevent self harm, you have to hold them down
I spent time in a mental health unit a few years back. The nurses and doctors were nice as pie to me but I saw one patient being singled out and racially abused by one particular oaf of a night nurse. He picked on this patient in my opinion because he was not white and spoke very limited English.
I feel guilty that I didn’t intercede but there’s a terrifying power imbalance in those places. No one believes what you’re saying, even if it’s the truth.
I think I was ok because I was young, pretty, small, well spoken and it was my first time – definitely a culture of staff giving up on return patients. My mum also spent all the time she could sitting in the waiting area, I had plenty of visitors so it was easy to ensure I was treated well. Folk with less visitors and outside oversight weren’t treated as well.
Edit: also hospitalised in Glasgow but not Stobhill
Fuck psychiatric units. Not individual nurses, but the system is just a prison for neurodivergent people. They should all close.
When I was in psychiatric unit as a teenager, I had staff call me fat/comment on me gaining weight, tell me that it’s normal for parents to beat their children, make fun of the patients.
One of the worst experiences I ever had. Capio Nightingale Hospital on the Kings Road.
some of you really struggle to believe that healthcare workers can sometimes be bad people. very weird
Potentially unkind of the nurses, but perhaps they were correct and honesty was best in the given context. Perhaps this is a thirst for victimhood where none exists?
I do wonder how many people crying about this in the replies have ever worked with people with severe psychiatric illnesses.
I saw a 6 foot, 16 year old girl break a copper’s nose trying to resist treatment after she overdosed on paracetamol. Are we supposed to just let psych nurses/doctors have the shit kicked out of them? This entire article is hearsay.
>Nurses at psychiatric unit called teens ‘pathetic’
I mean…this seems pretty weak stuff.
Nurses are human beings. They work 12 hour shifts…get spat at, kicked, punched, abused, sued for no reason, bullied by managers, lacking support from the public and badly paid….
If they snap at someone…I can’t blame them.
Glasgow had a huge staff shortage…they hide it with bank staff….but routinely staff are put on high risk and high dependency wards with under the regulated limit of staff…every day they prevent disasters.
If they snap at someone….boohoo.
Remember when we clapped for these people?
This is not a defence of the nurses (because I haven’t even read the story), but the term “pathetic” isn’t inherently a pejorative; it means “inspiring pity”. You can say “he was a pathetic sight” with no insult whatsoever.
Just noting this because I feel like the non-pejorative sense, arguably the main meaning of this word, is rapidly being replaced with the pejorative version.
Yeah I saw most of this in the CAMHS ward I used to work in. It’s the culture. They sell it as how you have to maintain rational detachment from some of the horrific stuff you hear about, and that leads to a very cold, uncaring culture, particularly around the older generation of nurses. In environments like this you either get traumatised or do the traumatising.
They need to ban mobile phones in the wards. The people going live on TikTok from psych wards have made young people think they are safer in there than at home.
I’ve known staff break down in tears after being told they were going to be moved to an adolescent ward for the day because the risk of assault or false allegations is much higher.