stress, risk and learning to share
i had a really hard week, a service user i work with was discharged from hospital after being an informal patient last Friday. over the last week things have started to deteriorate, the person in question is in the prodromal phase of psychosis so sometimes his psychotic symptoms are quite prominent and at times they can be covered up quite well.
the service user had begun to express suicidal ideation, which had started off as a passing comment to becoming really hopeless. i became concerned that not only does psychosis make people think in ways that they would not normally, i had known this person be quite impulsive at times.
to understand this service users position it is useful to look at Zubin and Springs Stress / Vulnerability model in which they propose that some people are more vulnerable to the negative effects of stress and if these people have too much stress they can become unwell the lower your threshold for managing stress the less stress it takes to push you over the edge. well that's how i understand it to befor more informaation there is a good piece written by our very own resident nurse Stuart Sorenson here.
so we managed to get together a good robust plan for the weekend. My Early Intervention in Psychosis team does not have weekend cover, the new crisis/home treatment team are currently understaffed as it is a very new service and up until now have not had to do weekend stuff however they did find someone from their team (of two!) to visit over the weekend and we managed to get a support worker from another mental health team to visit on the other day of the weekend. i had offered myself but to be honest i needed a break and my colleagues saw that.
i have learnt a valuable lesson this week which is not to try and carry risky / difficult cases by myself, it's dangerous for the service user and dangerous for me, i am the only Early Intervention worker in my area of the locality, my colleague is a 45 minute drive away and although she is available on the phone, she is also very busy. i think i felt awkward about asking people from different teams for help and probably part of me saw myself as not being good enough if i could not cope with it on my own. however the people who did help me in the end were more than willing to and did not bat an eyelid about it, in fact they could see i was beginning to crumble under the pressure of it all
so the hardest week i had experienced as a newly qualified social worker became a week where i learnt a valuable lesson and where i felt the benefits of colleague support.