nursingforsocialjustice

We have been living in a state of health emergency for half of the year. There is not an end in sight. The last 6 months has allowed some of us, including me, to engage in some deep reflection about what we are doing with our lives. I returned to work on an inpatient mental health unit. When I left my full-time position on that unit roughly one year before I thought I would never go back to direct care. I thought that was my last kick at the can for inpatient mental health. When I returned, this time as a casual staff nurse, initially it felt like I was going home, but as I worked more shifts I realized I could not recaptured the memory of hope the unit once inspired in me.

I am thankful for the energy, the inspiration, the hope, the happiness that I found working there with the people I did, at the time that I did. The leadership, the co-staff, the time and energy spent on planning and developing a model to support evidence informed practice and nursing driven practice helped me in mental health. When I go back now my experience is that familiar feeling that I have had on every other inpatient mental health unit I have been a staff nurse on. That feeling tells me I have to let go and move on.

For me, nursing in the inpatient mental health world is a constant struggle. The moral distress that I experience as a staff nurse these settings is so much that I cannot work full time in that type of setting in that type of role. Some of these places and people saved my nursing career. Over the years I have worked in places that have sparked my hope that inpatient mental health can change, I have worked with leaders and teams that so much believed in change that I was inspired to stay in healthcare. But the systemic barriers that I have encountered, the resistance to change, the weight of risk aversion and structural violence, the seemingly immovable hierarchy within the system overpowers and often crushes the momentum of these small pockets of change. This breaks my heart. There has been more than one time in my life when the courageous hearts of a team are decimated by the system. And I assure you, it is never the patients that burns us out, it is the system.

It’s hard to face the day when you feel like you are not just bearing the burden of decades of injustice, and also trying to ignite the fire of collective reflection and transformative change. It can feel incredibly lonely. And, it’s hard to be alone. This stigma about mental health issues and/or substance use that we are constantly trying to overcome or extinguish, when does it end? I know how I can determine when we have achieved it. I will know we have achieved it when I am no longer full of shame or fear when someone asks me if I have any siblings, or about my dad. I’ll know it’s achieved the next time someone asks me how my dad died and there isn’t an uncomfortable silence when I reply “cirrhosis”. When I stop worrying about the story that the other person is making up in their head about my childhood, a story that probably does not at all match my actual childhood.

How Do I Re-Energize My Nursing Energy?

– find like-minded nurses to chat with outside of work

– find allies in the workplace

– take a break. Sometimes this means taking a vacation, sometimes this means taking another job.

– read literature outside of nursing to gain perspective

-write

By the end of all of this, my end game is not just dismantling this seemingly rock solid structure of oppression and patriarchy we call psychiatry but to burn it down so that it becomes lessons learned. And, from this wreckage, the metaphorical Phoenix we call nursing will rise from those ashes and make this world a better place where human beings are one, and social justice lives at the centre of everything, and deviating from the norm is also worthy not just of care and compassion but it just is. Imagine if we shared this collective memory of all the things that led us here? And this collective memory didn’t live somewhere over there in a book that no one ever reads, but lives in our heads and hearts?

Remember that time a bunch of white, middle aged, upper middle class people got to make the decisions for everyone else? That’s right now and it has to change. This next decade of midlife crisis is about using whatever voice or power I do have to change this bullshit structure of this bullshit system.

Peace,

Michelle D.