Fragile Minds: stories from an NHS mental health ward by Bella Jackson
This is an important memoir which outlines the experiences of a student mental health nurse training in the NHS. On her first clinical placement, Jackson finds herself puzzling over the attitudes and behaviours of her nursing colleagues and the psychiatrists who are paid to care for the patients on an acute psychiatric ward. As time goes by, Jackson moves from acceptance to become highly sceptical and then critical of the psychiatric paradigm. She discovers that there is no evidence to support the scientific-sounding psychiatric diagnoses, which are made on the basis of flimsy and inadequate evaluations of patients’ emotions and behaviours. Finding some allies within the nursing team, Jackson gains the confidence to interrogate the biomedical system of psychiatry in more detail. When she witnesses the countless number of times that patients on the ward are coerced into taking psychiatric drugs, and the consequences of their refusal, she understands why disgruntled colleagues migrate to the relative independence of community work.
Jackson writes about her experiences with compassion for both the patients unwittingly caught up in the erratic and overstretched services, but also for the staff, many of whom are reliant on agency work to earn a living. However, this will be a particularly difficult read for both survivors and family alike, because many of the composite patient stories Jackson describes, are both heartbreaking and also provocative. They rightly leave the reader feeling enraged at a psychiatric system that is neither supported by robust evidence, nor willing to hear the voices of those who have been harmed. For this reason, ‘Fragile Minds’ needs to be read by those who work in the system, in the hope that they open their minds to the possibility of change. It is a great addition to the memoirs of survivors with lived experience of the psychiatric system, to have a purely ‘staff’ perspective of life on an acute psychiatric ward.