Mental health treatment like a 'kick in the head'

There's an old saying I've heard: "mental health treatment's like a kick in the head". One mental health nurse took the saying literally. Jongo Vandi, who worked at Broadmoor Hospital, actually kicked a patient in the head.

Let's assume the patient was being 'difficult' at the time. It is Broadmoor after all. So, you'd expect the quality of the staff to be such that they go unphased under provocation, to be of the calibre that they know how to diffuse a volatile situation, that they know through their extensive training how to 'talk someone down', and so on and so on. But no, Mr Vandi kicked the patient in the head.

Alot of the patients in Broadmoor are violent. Sounds like Mr Vandi's just as bad.

Scraping the barrel when it comes to personnel

Another mental health nurse is behind bars after it was found he'd accessed child pornography sites on a computer he'd been using at the Charlton Centre, a residential home for the elderly in Batley, West Yorkshire.

The Yorkshire Post headline was "Mental health nurse had 40,000 indecent images of children". The story goes on to reveal the mental health nurse, Ivor Foster, had checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital called Fieldhead Hospital prior to the stuff being found on the computer he'd been using at the care home. He'd gone to Fieldhead because he was depressed. That means a depressed nurse was looking after people in a residential home, people who suffer from Alzheimer's diseases or dementia.

I regularly read all this stuff about psychiatric patients and their vulnerabilities, and then I read about the quality of the people looking after them. If this is the quality of personnel looking after people with mental illness, and Mr Foster isn't the only blot on the mental health nurse landscape, there must be a barrel that doesn't have a bottom after being scraped long and hard.

Foster was jailed for 14 months after he admitted 21 offences of possessing or making indecent images.

Brilliant name for a shrink...

Professor David Nutt is listed with the General Medical Council as a specialist in General Psychiatry. I must admit I had to check the story first. I thought it might be one of those spoof sites to begin with. A psychiatrist called Professor Nutt? Surely not. Actually, yes, it's legit. Brilliant name for a shrink!

After searching back a little way, Professor Nutt has been in the news on a number of occasions, for playing down the use of illegal street drugs. On the BBC News web site, it was reported that "Prof Nutt says cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or nicotine..." This is the same Prof who, in February this year, said taking ecstasy was no more dangerous than 'riding a horse.'

Problem is his statements are more likely to be those of someone who consumes illegal drugs, not someone who's attempting to halt the problem. Why employ an expensive Prof to advise on this sort of thing when it would've been cheaper to get the same advice from someone happily consuming the drugs? If the problem is as big as the Government says it is, then there's plenty of fokes out there who would've given the same advice for considerably less than Prof Nutt.

The story hasn't finished either. According to the Telegraph, other members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs are planning to resign. Don't know about you, but that hints at the idea they approve of his statements, that they downplay the dangers of illegal drugs. Wonder what sort of parties the advisers go to at the weekend? The Telegraph headline says "Drug policy in chaos after adviser is sacked." Errr, don't think so. I think drug policy was in chaos a long time before now. How else would there be such a problem with illegal drugs?