The ability to reflect critically is a vital nursing skill. It will help your students to make better decisions, avoid errors, identify good and bad forms of practice and become better at learning from their experiences. The challenges they will face as a mental health nurse are complex so this book breaks things down to the foundations helping them to build critical thinking and reflection skills from the ground up. Key features: * Covers the theory and principles behind critical thinking and reflection * Explores the specific mental health context and unique challenges students are likely to face as a mental health nurse * Applies critical thinking to practice but also to academic study, showing how to demonstrate these skills in assignments

Do you want to know how to help people with mental health problems?

This book introduces you to the core skills and essential knowledge you need to deliver high-quality care.

"Mental Health Nursing" is a practical, values- and evidence-based resource which will guide and support you through your pre-registration mental health nursing programme and into your own practice.

Dedicated chapters focus on the major mental health problems, and are clearly structured so that you can quickly and easily identify what you want learn about helping people with, for example, depression, anxiety, psychosis, or acute mental health problems.

The most up-to-date theories, as well as mental health policies and law from all four countries of the UK, are explained accessibly by experienced lecturers and nurse practitioners who show you through real-life case scenarios how you can use your newly-acquired knowledge and skills to deliver high-quality care yourself. You will also be encouraged - through regular reflection and discussion points - to see things with a critical eye and to engage in and drive on the debates that make mental health nursing such an exciting field to be studying and working in.

Set within a framework which emphasises and makes clear the core skills, values and knowledge-base you need to become capable mental health nurse, you will find this book a vital companion as you progress through your studies and onto helping people confidently in everyday life.

"God Has it come to this?" Meet Grace, white-haired, with dementia, being admitted to the daunting asylum with an unwelcome introduction from the student nurse. Then Percy, the crystal radio buff, with depression. Here is Harry, the Japanese ex-POW, whose bath-time is a re-living of battles fought and Walter, with the dodgy and less than faithful, girl-friend. What about Tom, who is getting secret signs from both the Newscaster on the BBC as well as the landlady of the local pub, or Betty who won't fit in the coffin, and needs a bit of encouragement? But also meet Stuart, the very novice student nurse fearfully working on nights, standing there being strangled, not knowing what to do, or trying to come to grips on his first day on the ward with shaving a corpse. Learn about what goes on in the long asylum corridor & how to survive the laws of the asylum jungle. Stuart has to rely on information from the unlikeliest of sources, the Social Club hard drinkers. Asylum Bound is a wild weird walk through the experiences of a student nurse as he enters the unknown world of the mental "asylum" of the 1970s. It is a bizarre world, a world of terrible extremes. Within this odd place there are Hogarthian characters of varying chaotic hues, some aggressive, some sad, some disturbed and some institutionalised, both patients and staff. It is in this strange world that Stuart begins to understand the origins of psychiatry and its terrible treatments, including lobotomies, E.C.T., insulin shock and even aversion therapy for underwear snatchers. He has to learn about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, new and frightening conditions that had new and frightening treatments and outcomes. But he finds an asylum coming to the end of any usefulness it might ever once have had. The patients are leaving, the staff are changing, and, thank God, the abuses are declining. It is a different world from anything he has experienced before. It is a very new world. It is a life-changing revelation. For Stuart, what started as a novelty, progressed to fascination and was to end in tragedy. It was the start of a long psychiatric nursing career. It is, sadly, all true.

"It has everything; familial hatreds, great love, romance and failed relationships, attempts by the character to change patterns of life -in fact all the ingredients of a page -turner. It is written in a highly charged poetic style and is full of fine imagistic writing and It should be published both because of all the above and because it is an individual experience which has universal significance. " - By Siobhan Campbell, Tutor on M A Creative Writing Course Kingston University

Description

Mad? Sad? Or Bad? the truth about Alzheimer's Disease. After a lifetime of coping with a very difficult - and sometimes nasty - mother, Patricia now faces her parents decline and impending death. As she guided her mother through family history, she tries to unravel what has always ailed the older woman.The story moves through darkness, to understanding and to skeletons in the cupboard. And ultimately to love.

But Patricia reaches a mind- blowing conclusion about what she believes to lie behind old age dementia.

About the Author

Pamela spent most of her working life bringing up four children and doing casual jobs.. she took a degree in English and at a local university and then taught in Adult Education and became a Market Research Interviewer. When her work dwindled in the Recession of the 1990s, she tried for a while to run her own private Adult Education business. She has always wanted to write and began in her twenties. She has broadcast her own talk on the radio, published some short stories and articles, and had prizes in a few writing competitions. Pamela lives in The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames.

Book Extract

"'....And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' For the first time I am listening to what the nurse is saying about my eighty-eight year-old Mother.

'I like her, ' she had begun. What's all this? I asked myself. My mother's never got on with anybody, and probably nobody has ever liked her. She certainly doesn't like anyone much. We talk, as I scrabble around trying to remember how the conversation had started. 'She asked me where I came from. Tells me she has always wanted to travel...' Well, we all know that old story, don't we?

'...And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' That's when my ears pricked up. I'd hardly been listening, having looked after my mother for as long as I can remember, having lived her life rather than my own... But now this, at nearly ninety and last week nearly dead. 'What do you mean, what do you mean? In and out - in and out?'

'Oh - everything, ' the nurse laughs. 'And it is so good for you, because it's genetic.' Genetic? I am her, not exactly a case of symbiosis, since it has not been beneficial to me, but something like that.

A week ago, I stood over my mother, having been summoned to what I had thought was her deathbed. She was asleep, but gasping in her sleep, and I thought, 'Are you gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life? No, what I really thought was, you look like I feel. Gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life. And now this, the perfect figure? A young girl's body beneath that weary face? The tune 'Beautiful Dreamer' comes back into my mind. I think she even used to sing it, way far back, or at least hum it anyway.

Beautiful Dreamer, a Sleeping Beauty, is it really that? Is that old face weary with disappointment? Because the young girl's body has never been satisfied? Yet my mother has never shown any strong desires for such needs to be fulfilled. I am a Sleeping Beauty too, but I know it.

Manual Of Psychiatric Nursing Skills Guides Nursing Students And Practicing Nurses Towards Enhancing Fundamental Psychiatric Nursing Skills Competency In Specific Assessment And Interventions For The Selected Psychiatric Disorders. A Nursing Skill Book In A Manual Format, This Text Is Handy At The Clinical Site And Encourages Readers To Translate Their Theoretical Knowledge And Psychiatric Nursing Skills Into Clinical Practice. Topics Include Therapeutic Communication Techniques, Assessment And Interventions For Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, And Suicide Attempts, And Crisis Management Skills For Psychiatric Emergencies. Included In The Appendices Are Essential Insights Into Ego Defense Mechanisms, Erickson'S Psychosocial Developmental Stages, Freud'S Stages Of Psychosexual Development, And Piaget'S Stages Of Cognitive Development.