Patients should be at the heart of everything in healthcare. Mental health patients are seen by many systems as the product – a broken piece of glassware in their shiny factories that need either to be pieced together or swept out onto the street.
My heart is deeply invested in critiquing the system and ensuring patients are reflected in everything that is said and done in the modern psych ward. Through a seven year period, I was hospitalised eleven times across seven different hospitals. These were public and private in four different areas of Sydney, governed by four different health corporations. I have not seen best practice. I have not witnessed anything that could justifiable be called ârecovery orientedâ or âtrauma informedâ despite these phrases being scattered across policies, promotions and job descriptions. I am not talking about hospitalisations from decades ago, I have lived experience only in the decade past.
I was subjected to the most traumatising experiences in my life while I was in hospital. I have twice believed that I was definitely about to die – both times in public hospitals that failed to quell my paranoia. Following this lived experience of trauma in hospitals, another hospital paid me to be retraumatised daily by sharing my stories of illness and recovery. I put my own psychological safety on the line for three years without adequate support or emotional supervision while re-exposing myself to highly similar environments as where I was certain I was going to die.
My lived experience and work experience offer a tragic first hand account of the decay in quality due to a corrosion of humanist values and blaming of underfunding for serious lapses in compassion. I lost my marriage and nearly lost my life while under the care of clinical teams. These are not the fault of clinicians but so much more could have been done to help me, help myself. I experienced major failures of clinical practice that one Chief Executive even apologised for in writing but I will always carry some degree of shame, trauma, and sadness from these seven years of mental ill health.
I am also angry but it is not what motivates my interest in writing or advocating for change. Employees, clinicians, carers and especially survivors have a valid right to be angry about the mistakes and uncompassionate care that are unavoidable with our current health models.
I choose to recognise my anger about system failures and replace it with hope that we still have excellent people fighting globally for better mental health outcomes. Change projects are happening and we are learning from practices in other states or countries. In some organisations, we are already empowering patients to have a voice in how their services are delivered.
In other parts of our hospitals, better models of patient engagement are emerging. In oncology for example, we have some exceptional wards and organisations that are working with patients and their families to incorporate more holistic care including therapeutic interventions that are often dismissed or unfunded across the way in the mental health ward.
To move forward, mental health wards and psychiatric hospitals must first own their mistakes. They must purge the old coercive ways from their sites and accept that even therapies with strong evidence behind them can be too harmful to the lives of patients to be useful.
Kirkby (2009) stated that âpsychiatry is in its infancy and it stands but on the threshold of its true vocation, the elimination of mental illnessâ. Experimenting with different cocktails of drugs over months and years is clumsy but still necessary because better approaches are not properly studied and funded.
Next Madness Post: The Façade of Language
1 Pingback