It’s unfair and inaccurate to pretend that all parents of people who harm themselves are to blame. There are parents who treat their children in horrendous ways and who really do cause long term mental health problems. But they are not the norm.
Most parents, although fallible like everyone else, are ‘good enough’.
Confidentiality can be a real headache for carers. Whether their loved one is being cared for by the NHS or by some other health or social care organisation they often have great difficulty in getting the information they need to care for their relative or friend as the vital part of the care team that they actually are. But does this really need to be the case?
It’s true, of course that people have the right to privacy, including those people who need care services – a fact that few carers would deny or seek to change. But patients and service-users don’t necessarily want to keep EVERYTHING private. Very often the problem arises, not because people have the right to confidentiality but because of the way that workers approach the issue when discussing confidentiality with them in the first place.
It’s important to be nuanced in matters of confidentiality. too often the question is asked…
“Do you want your family to know about your care?”
Really we ought to be far more specific. We need to differentiate more between the types of information we can disclose and that we should not. After all, there can’t be too many young men who would want their mothers to know all about their sex lives or other, equally personal details. Professional care workers need to be much more specific about the types of information to be disclosed and also about which family members or friends it will be disclosed to.
Most carers don’t want the intimate details of personal issues anyway. They do want to understand about medication regimes, care planning, symptoms and side effects, relapse profiles and plans and they need to know who to contact when things go wrong. This requires far more nuanced discussions than typically happen in over-stretched care services. So here’s my solution…
Click here to download a form that you can use to help workers determine just what information can be shared and with whom. It takes all the difficulty out of the equation for care workers by providing them with clear, unambiguous guidance about what they can and cannot disclose.
It is important that the form is completed collaboratively with a representative of the professional care team. The organisation working with the patient or service-user will have legal issues to consider and the worker may need to speak to their management about the form. Don’t ‘ambush’ them with the form. Let them know about it in advance. Ideally give them a copy to discuss with their management first. That way there should be no problems when you do sit down to complete it.
Complete this form at a time when the patient has the mental capacity to make the decision. Staff will not be able to abide by confidentiality decisions made when the patient lacks the capacity to decide.
Please feel free to get in touch, especially let me know of your experiences in using the form. It’d be great to hear from you.
Caring for people with psychosis can be both stressful and mystifying. People who hear voices and respond to visions that the carer can neither hear nor see present particular problems and frustrations. It’s distressing for the individual voice-hearer and, for different reasons it’s distressing for their relatives and other carers as well.
“It’s real for them” is a common expression intended to promote empathy and understanding but there are very real drawbacks if that’s as far as it goes. We all know it’s real for them – that’s why they’re distressed, but if we simply accept that without question we give up a vital part of the recovery process.
In this video we explore the positive benefits that can come from refusing to accept that ‘it’s real for them’ whilst still accepting the other person’s experience. We look at the power of attribution in psychosis, especially in relation to hallucinations and consider the benefits of helping people to change their view about their hallucinations. It isn’t trivialising the problem to see it for what it is. A voice has no power unless the voice-hearer gives it some. However distressing and disturbing voices are they’re still only voices.
By helping people to reframe their interpretation of voices they hear we can reduce the power, the distress and the disruption of those voices.
Please feel free to comment either here on the blog or by using the contact form below and let me know how helpful or otherwise this video has been for you. Please also let me know if you’d like me to cover any other issues facing carers and relatives. I can’t promise to cover everything but I’ll do my best to help if I can.
Those of us who work in mental health services, be that for the NHS or in social care settings receive both payment and training for our efforts. However, there’s an army of unpaid, informal mental health carers who receive neither, despite the fact that without their contributions the whole system would collapse.
It’s estimated that informal carers save the NHS more than it actually spends each year and that situation doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.
The ‘Carers in mind’ project is my attempt to help redress the balance by providing information and training in practical ways for carers struggling everyday to hold their families together, often in truly desperate circumstances.
If you’re a carer involved in mental health please feel free to comment and let me know what you’d like me to cover. I can’t promise to fulfil every request but I’ll do my best.
Please leave a comment to let me know what you’d like me to cover as this series progresses or use the contact form below to get in touch privately.
Mind The Care Training 