World Suicide Prevention Day

With it being World Suicide Prevention day this week, I felt compelled to look into suicide rates for nurses. The statistics can only be described as shocking and worrying.

I feel that mental health awareness is only something in recent years that has been highlighted and truly embraced.

Even myself as a nurse I am ashamed to say that when I was a student, I was ignorant not only to mental health but the signs, the symptoms and the variety of ways in which it presents itself.

Recently, I’ve found myself echoing the phrase that nurses spend so much time looking after others; we often forget to look after ourselves.

When I was a student I cannot remember there being enough information and guidance surrounding, the importance of being in a good mental frame of mind. Of course, there was conversation of a good work life balance but does an eighteen year old fresh from college faced with the realities of children dying, combined with university commitments and financial difficulties, truly understand what a ‘good work life balance’ is.

With the increase in tuition fees and the scrapping of bursaries, student nurses are now under even more pressure financially as well as mentally.

Reflecting back on my career I realise I actually suffered with a degree of anxiety in my NQN job. The fear of getting things wrong. Making mistakes. A patient dying and it being my fault.

I had an incident occur that nearly caused me to leave the profession altogether. I remember people being supportive initially, but then I was encouraged that I had to be “strong” and “get on with it” as these are things we are ultimately faced with in our career. Looking back I realise that this kind of advice is completely detrimental.

We are not robots. We have feelings and are allowed to feel things as deeply as we need to, for as long as we need to.

I too still need to work on self care. I find that as nurses we sometimes have a dry sense of humour, probably to stop ourselves from crying. We laugh about our late lunch breaks and needing to pee; but we have to look after ourselves even if our government won’t look after us. We need to look out for each other and be kind to one another, and we need to continue to insist that the right help is put in place to protect our mental health.

But we have to look after ourselves even if our government won’t look after us. We need to look out for each other and be kind to one another, and we need to continue to insist that the right help is put in place to protect our mental health.

I am going to make more time to educate myself about mental health and dedicate more time to self care.

I hope you remember to do the same too.