the reason i blog
why do i blog? i thought a post asking this question maybe quite interesting to myself if no one else!
i work in ruralruralshire and spend a lot of my time alone in my car going to visit service users and families and occasionally going to meetings - i am trying hard to not become a professional meeting attender !
my job is quite stressful and often i feel quite isolated, out early intervention in psychosis team works from a hub and spoke model which in case people do not know means that we have a hub ( a main office ) and little satellite teams are based around the locality although up until last week we did not have a hub we just had spokes and as you can imagine, if you use a wheel as an analogy if you dont have a hub there is nothing to keep the spokes together, we know do have a brand spanking new office but our area is so large we envisage only getting to the hub once a week for a morning when we have our team meetings, this can leave us all feeling rather disjointed and takes work to keep us feeling like a team - so we are still experimenting with how we do this. - we have set up a peer support group that meets once a month and a reflective practice group so we can talk about our own feelings and how this effects our work. some team members have felt uncomfortable with the old touchy feely social work style of sharing our emotions and as the only social worker in the team i take the blame for suggesting such a thing.ijust noticed myself getting very stressed with the emotional impact of the work and needed a forum to share this,someone said shouldn't this be part of supervsion but there is so much other stuff to talk about in supervision there just is not time and besides i think it will bring us closer as a team........it's still in early stages at the moment and i am not sure about how it will pan out but we are giving it a try and the team members who dont feel that they need it have opted out which is fine as i think you need to be comfortable with the whole thing.
i found some excellent stuff on Fighting Monsters blog in the comments section with a link to the University of Buffalo website where they have a self care starter kit for their social work students which has some good resources which i will be sharing with my colleagues at our next 'lets talk out feelings 'group.
so to get back to my reasons for blogging one of the reasons is that my job is quite isolating and i feel like i carry a lot of risk sometimes and have always found writing to be a great outlet right from when i was a troubled / troublesome teenager and i hope some of the stuff i share others can identify with,i know i often feel reassured when i read about something that others maybe struggling with to, it helps me realise i am not just the only one struggling with such issues and i dont blame myself for being incompetent or not a superhero!
i also as i have said before absolutely love my job and i want others to know how rewarding this sort of work can be, how intervening early can stop some of those long term negative efffects of having any sort of mental illness can have; poor housing,poor physical health, social exclusion, social isolation and low expectations. these have in the past been an unfortunate side effect of mental health issues and they dont need to be, i like to think of it in terms of the social model of disability where its society that has prevented people from fulfilling their potential by having negative and discriminatory and stigmatised ideas about people with lived experience, whereas if we can change societies views and embrace diversity in all forms, all members of society can contribute and our communities would be a much fuller and more interesting place and people would be more fulfilled.
I also want to bring attention to Early Intervention in Psychosis Teams as i dont think everyone knows they exist and to the social work contribution and how close the principles and values of early intervention in psychosis is to social work values