The Locked Ward: A humane and revealing account of life on the frontlines of mental health care.

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Code brown! The scene painted where a patient uses his bowels to try to escape restraint is hilarious This was a fantasy, certainly. My father was ten years old in 1939. But when I googled ‘Can handwriting be inherited?’ I read of various experiments measuring the similarity between different aspects of handwriting (orientation, size, letter formation etc). And I learned that the incidence of inherited handwriting characteristics is (or was in these experiments) highest between father and son. It is as high as 98.3 per cent. The register must have been produced by my grandfather. This was eminently possible. My paternal grandparents lived and worked at Netherne from the mid 1920s, and my father was born there. During my father’s infancy my grandfather worked as an asylum attendant, but by the late 1930s he was profoundly deaf (after a surgical intervention to improve his deafness in one ear was carried out – unbelievably – on the wrong ear) and employed as the hospital clerk. It is likely that at some point during J.J. Beegan’s years at Netherne my grandfather turned the key on him. And maybe he did other things too. Perhaps he was kind to him, perhaps he wasn’t. I stayed in Tresillian, the sleep unit of a public hosptital, and I wasn't there to socialise, have coffee, or join in any activities, so my judgement was a little piqued here. I needed to reign it in. I also wasn't sure about the milestones of Natalie's baby, and the diet including chocolate milk. But I digress. She wasn't quite 12 months and was rather advanced.

I really enjoyed this novel. Ms Buist provides an intriguing set of characters and several twists in the story which kept me guessing until the end. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Research Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the Ruhr University Bochum with written informed consent from all subjects. The protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the Ruhr University Bochum (Reg. No. 15-5452). Author Contributions He would never lose sight of the fact that he was dealing with patients not responsible for what they did or said. But Detective Damian McBride (Sienna’s dad) reveals some facts about the case, and after discussion with Liam, Natalie begins to see alternative scenarios. She also recognises that Joanna McGowan may well be pursuing her own agenda. Meanwhile, on the home front, Natalie is dealing with access demands from Damian, and Liam’s ex-wife is being difficult about their children. Staff were described as welcoming and those that we spoke with told us that they had good connections with staff,” it said.But one thing did strike me as worth mentioning : the curious psychological condition of Erotomania, which pops up on p154. I quote from one of Dennis’s non-jovial infodumps : Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing Australia for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Take the patient’s case history. Like all life stories the case history was constructed retrospectively. The moment a patient entered the asylum what had felt like ‘life’ was recast as a set of symptoms and clues to an underlying illness. The case history gathered together the information that pointed to the diagnosis that explained the fact of being a patient. It was a closed circle. And since what was at stake for the patients was nothing less than the nature of their human nature, whatever happened to them was expressive of their whole self – so that through the unfolding case history a patient’s past mistakes and present progress were under constant review. The paradox, for Goffman, was that the emphasis on moral or ‘human’ progress resulted so often in a kind of fatigue. One of the best ways to survive the ups and downs of the asylum’s rigorous but arbitrary moral climate was to cultivate a kind of ‘civic apathy’. It was far easier to be resigned to your fate as a hopeless case than to strive against it. In other words, you might as well just give up. The process Goffman was describing was one of learning to consent. As patients consented to their own condition as patients they were helping the staff to make the institutions work. The review also found that support workers were, at the time, not trained adequately on observation policy. Responding to the recommendations made by the Mental Welfare Commission, NHS Tayside said: “Concerns around informal patients being in IPCU were discussed with the clinical team and it was recognised this can happen occasionally due to bed pressures in general wards. So, tell me some of the favorite stories you encountered, the personal moments you’ve had, and some of the experiences with — with patients that you had in the Berkshire Medical Center.As well as this, the commission has also asked NHS Tayside bosses to ensure that there is a dedicated clinical psychology input for the ward. I was 23 and I’d never heard of psychosis. I was confused as to what the hell was happening. The doctors were equally unsure. At one point, I was looked at by a neurosurgeon. At another point, they thought I had schizophrenia. The jury was out for quite some time as they worked out how best to deal with me. The actual breakdown probably didn’t last very long, but I think I was suffering from the effects of psychosis for months.