Mental Nursing as a Career
- Author:
Irene Y. Liddell
The Editorial Board does not hold itself responsible for the opinions of contributors Vol. I. No. 2 APRIL 1940 Price lOd. (1/- Post Free)
Staff Nurse, Claybury Mental Hospital ; winner ” Lord” Memorial Essay Prize, 1940
The metamorphosis of public opinion is notoriously slow. Although the last two or three decades must have done much to disabuse the public mind of its misconceptions with regard to mental hospitals, there is still some distaste felt by parents at the suggestion that mental nursing might be a suitable career for their daughters. Before an attempt is made to overcome this, the conditions and opportunities which the mental nursing service offers to-day will be outlined.
Conditions of Mental Nursing
Eighteen is the earliest age at which a girl may enter a mental hospital for training. Her commencing salary, together with various emoluments?and with consideration of the fact that she is taking a training?compares very favourably with other branches ?f nursing and other types of work. It is not expected that the probationer shall have matriculated or possess the school leaving certificate, as it is in many general hospitals, but such attainments are appreciated and the standard of education required has for a long time been on the up-grade.
Efforts are made, to-day, to allow the young probationer to become acclimatized to her work in wards allotted to convalescent patients, as it is probable that her future attitude to her work will be largely influenced by the impressions received in the early Part of her training. In past times, many a girl must have been frightened away ^together by being plunged too suddenly into contact with patients whose mental Alness was at the acute stage. It is encouraging to know that this eventuality is now foreseen and as far as possible prevented.
Training of Mental Nurses
The course of training is usually for three years and during that time the nurse attends several series of lectures which help her to understand and to recognize various types of mental illness. The earliest of these will deal with elementary physiology, with hygiene, with first aid and with the rudiments of practical nursing. She will ‘earn during these first few months how to make a bed, take a temperature, do a simple dressing, how to recognize instruments and appliances in everyday use, and what special precautions must be observed in relation to her patients. Later she will be given a further course of lectures which will prepare her for the preliminary part of the examination held for mental nurses by the Royal Medico-Psychological Association. The main subjects of this are physiology and practical nursing. After an interval, the nurse proceeds to the lectures for the final part of the R.M.P.A. certificate. These, while embracing the subjects already mentioned, include also psychology, both normal and abnormal. If she satisfies the examiners she will, when she has completed the stipulated period, be trained and qualified to hold a more responsible position. Should she fail at either examination she will by no means have to abandon her training as opportunities are given to sit more than once if necessary.
As an alternative to these examinations there are those held under the auspices of the General Nursing Council which admit the nurse to the State register. Many nurses do sit for both the R.M.P.A. and the State examinations, and the nurse who proposes to follow her mental by general training is well advised to do so, as the preliminary part of the State examination is the same for various branches of nursing. The nurse who goes on to general training will find the grounding she has received in the mental hospital an enormous help, and many general training schools are willing to shorten the course for the nurse who has been trained in a mental hospital. To the doubly trained nurse, lucrative positions of an administrative nature are open in the mental hospitals, but should she prefer to remain in general work she will find that the time spent in mental training will by no means be wasted as she will have acquired from it a valuable insight into human nature.
Recreation in the Mental Hospital
That, roughly, is how the training of the nurse proceeds as regards her work. The work is, of course, not the only aspect of life in a mental hospital. There is the social side. Some of the finest and most modern nurses’ homes are attached to mental hospitals and these have excellent dining and recreational rooms. It is the practice for dances, whist-drives and social evenings to be held and to some of these functions the nurse may invite her own friends. There are facilities for tennis, hockey and badminton in nearly all the hospitals, and, in some, for golf and swimming as well. The girl who enjoys sport will find an excellent outlet here as inter-hospital events are continually being arranged and the competition is keen.
For the more studious type of girl there is a library and the quiet of her own room in which to read and study when she wishes it. The majority of mental hospitals work a ninety-six hour fortnight and this allows considerable time for relaxation and the development of one’s own pursuits. There is little trace in the mental hospital of to-day of the rigorous “military ” discipline for which some of the general hospitals were notorious; the importance of adhering to rule is no less in evidence here than elsewhere, but generally speaking the rules do make an appeal to common sense and are not petty and irksome. Mental nurses are protected by their own Union which is continually on the look-out for opportunities to improve the conditions of the service and which also provides legal representation should it ever be required. The nurse who makes mental work a career can look forward to adequate provision in her old age as she will pay contributions to a superannuation fund which ensures her a pension.
Opportunities for the Mental Nurse
Certain courses are open to the nurse on the completion of her training: she may decide to remain in hospital, where she will after a time occupy a more responsible position and in some hospitals may be allowed to become non-resident: she may decide to branch out into private nursing, in which case she must bear in mind that her working hours will be longer and may be irregular, and also that mental nursing in a private home, if it has some advantages, has also peculiar difficulties?the responsibility is greater and there is not the moral support of superior officers to rely upon. If the nurse takes her general training and returns to mental work with, say, also her fever and midwifery certificates, the highest positions are open to her, providing she has the personal qualities necessary to hold them.
The Progress of Mental Treatment
In this discussion so far, the nurse has been referred to as ” she ” ; it must be pointed out that in a mental hospital the same training and opportunities are ?pen to young men. It is quite probable that on reading the foregoing a person seriously contemplating mental nursing as a career?not as a stop-gap?would feel that whilst having learned something of the conditions of the service, he or she still knew nothing about the work as a whole. This, it seems, can best be supplied by some account of the history of mental nursing, its aims and ideals, its hopes and its failures. It must be fairly generally recognized that the mental hospital of to-day is a very different place from the ” asylum ” of half a century back. Nevertheless, it ls apparent that certain sections of the lay mind are not aware of how great the difference is. Insanity, its causes and symptoms must, they would argue, always be much the same. Let us consider three factors which may help to elucidate the changed conditions of to-day.
The first of these is the fact that in the old days the type of patient herded into the asylums was more or less irrecoverable. Many thousands of people who spend a limited time in a mental hospital to-day?many voluntarily?would never have been Placed under care fifty years ago. The standard of intelligence amongst the masses Was lower and the demands of life much less urgent, and somehow or another these People would have ” weathered the storm”, or if they did eventually find their way into the asylums, it would certainly not have been in the early stages of their mental illness as is the case to-day.
The second factor is the changed times in which we live. The very speed of life to-day, the stresses peculiar to a mechanized age, not to mention numerous other social and economic causes with such effects as the increasing horror and devastation war, have bred a type of neurosis of their own. It has, too, become recognized by the medical profession that the ” functional ” disturbances of many patients, whose symptoms ” toe the line ” as far as the recognized idea of some disease is concerned, are nevertheless of neurotic origin and the fundamental cause of the trouble is frequently revealed as long established anxiety neurosis and phobias. This growing feeling of the very close interaction between mental and physical states tends to bring under the care of the mental hospitals a type of patient whom our grandparents would have hesitated to pronounce insane or even neurotic. It is not desired to give the impression that such persons need be certified; large numbers are treated as voluntary patients in our hospitals every year and many of these are recruited from the class under discussion. It obviously makes a great deal of difference, from the nursing point of view, that there is a so much greater percentage of border-line recoverable cases. It is true that many mental hospital patients are not regarded as recoverable, but can we safely say that of any case in this age of scientific progress ?
That brings us to the third factor to be considered in accounting for the change in our hospitals. During the past forty to fifty years?almost simultaneously if one can for a moment view time in relation to the development of the race and not the individual?a group of thinkers sprang up in Europe and America and began a rather belated study of the human mind. True, such study was far from new; it had been a vague form in the province of philosophy and metaphysics, but it was new in its application and intention. The infant sciences, psychology and psychopathology, became an adjunct of medicine and many and varied schools of thought arose.
Anyone engaged in mental nursing would be well repaid to learn something of the work of the men who formed the nuclei of these schools, Charcot, Miiller, Freud, Jung, Adler, Bergson and McDougall, not to mention the fascinating experiments of Pavlov. These and many others, both by themselves and by their conflict with each other, gave birth to knowledge, the effects of which are evident in mental nursing to-day. Not only should this study be absorbing because of the relation it bears to the work of every day, but because it helps one better to understand the aims of the research which is going on from day to day, and above all because it lifts the mental nurse out of the category of a mere wage-earner and makes her feel part of a great campaign to rid the world of a scourge. Perhaps the part is a small one, but viewed from this standpoint mental nursing does offer to the aspirant something vital, something more than the material opportunities outlined in the earlier part of this discussion. It offers an absorbing interest; it is a refining process in the development of character, for unusual patience and forbearance must emerge in the nurse for whom mental nursing is a vocation. It offers, too, opportunities for service to the helpless and afflicted and the joy of seeing them restored ; these are real values, quite as real if not quite as obvious as monetary gains.
The Ideal Mental Nurse
As regards the type of person best suited to the work, as a rather general rule the cool, level-headed, not over sensitive person is best. But a mental nurse should not be insensitive and unimaginative; in fact, the sensitive type of person, provided with a good fund of intelligence, reacts better to the work and will not find it an undue strain. Mental nursing ought to be regarded as a highly skilled profession, for what can need more delicate attention than an unbalanced mind ? The best people are needed and one feels that when the work is better understood it will attract these people, for there is in it a subtle and difficult art, which would appeal to the welldeveloped mind. No doubt as the number of chronic cases decreases and the number which can be treated successfully increases, there will be a response to the work from a type of person which might surprise us now, could we foresee it.
Mental nursing has much before it and from day to day important strides are being made; as witness the new treatments to which schizophrenia, most intractable of insanities, is beginning to yield. The nurse has her part in the administration of these and other new treatments and the results are most encouraging. A feature of some of the new methods is the increased pliability of the patient’s mind which is induced, and the nurse, because of her continual contact with her patients, has fine opportunities for helping them to reach and maintain the improved level attained.
It is understandable that a person in whose mind the old misconceptions of mental nursing lingered might hesitate before adopting it as a career. It is hoped that this discussion will have helped to dispel the idea of a dark and gloomy haunt with little interest except ministrations to the hopeless, and will have revealed an interesting and varied career with great opportunities for the present and even greater opportunities in the future.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.