Reflection: Anxiety

There are a fair few good olde posts on Mental Health floating around at the mo including the lovely Jennifer's series on peoples' stories.  These, plus the fact I have just rotated into a Mental Health role within my job have got me thinking about my own journey.

Today I got to attend our weekly supervision with the Psychologist and this week was about a few new types of therapy, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and Compassionate Therapy.  I won't go into them because that isn't what this post is about but what the session made me realise a few things about myself:

1. How far I have come managing my anxiety.
2. Recognise objectively how and why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can make things worse and how it did infact make me worse.
3. That number two is not actually necessary a reflection on the person themselves but a reminder that different things work differently for different people.
4. That mindfulness really was what galvanized my recovery. 
5. The fact that alongside mindfulness I learnt to use compassionate therapy to get rid of the things that were negatively impacting my anxiety and working harder on the things that positively impact.


 

A reflection on 10 months into a Rotation

I'm very aware that I have not updated this poor blog for quite sometime.  I think a large part of the reason for this is that I have been largely uninspired for the last ten months.  I have spent the last ten months working two rotations in an acute hospital, covering Respiratory and Orthopedics.

I'm not going to lie, I had a feeling acute hospital working would not be for me but having had no experience of it on placement I was up for "giving it a go".  My first gut feeling was right.

Don't get me wrong, there are some aspects of it I quite like but unfortunately these don't outweigh the pitfalls.  The last ten months have taught me an awful lot, such as how to work quickly and problem solve on the spot.  I have even enjoyed the thrill of working quickly and balancing my caseload, prioritizing.  I have not enjoyed the lack of respect for the OT role within the setting, no matter how much education or promotion we do and consequently the amount of unsafe discharges that are done daily/hourly/minutely due to professionals wanting to get people out as quickly as possible to avoid "breaching".  This leads me onto a mini rant, medical professionals so obsessed with treating the medical issue and forgetting that it was likely a social issue that lead to that medical issue bringing the patient into hospital in the first place.   

End rant.

I have thus spent the majority of the last ten months moaning at my work mates, who are also frustrated due to lack of staff and so unable to do their job to full potential.  I also find the setting lacking my two favourite things about OT: Rapport and person centredness.  I have always been great with people, this is something all my educators have commented on and so to be in a job lacking both, has been quite unfullfilling!

Until now.  On Friday I went to visit my next rotation and I felt immediately in my element! Even setting up a cross stitch group and building rapport with my caseload already! THIS is where I want to be! Creative freedom, time to get to know and support patients: Older Persons Mental Health.

I'm sure some of you are probably thinking "Well you never should've done the rotation then, if you knew where you wanted to go".  Life is just not that simple i'm afraid, at the end of the day, we just don't have the options to wait around for our perfect job.  Alongside this, I wasn't entirely sure if I would be able to handle a career in Mental Health, due to the risk of burn out.  This is where a rotation is key, it really does help you find your way to where you want to be, whether it is by doing a rotation and knowing it's your calling/worst nightmare or if it's piecing together your favourite bits from the jigsaw from different rotations to make the perfect job.

Benefits of baking

On the plane on the way back from holiday the other day (just had to get that in there;-)), I stumbled across a rather interesting article . 
The article really was interesting, almost doing a mini activity analysis when talking about self identity and worth.
I've seen a few things along these lines recently and I'm rather torn about it.

On one hand I genuinely got rather excited about the fact a newspaper was publishing the therapeutic benefits of things and even grabbed the boyfriend's arm to drag him into my excitement.  In case you're wondering his response was equivalent to "that's nice dear". 

On the other hand, I am rather sad that firstly, OT was not mentioned at all (prime opportunity to highlight what OT is, no?) and this leads me onto the other finger, I feel like people are onto our OT secret and so it no longer makes us special!