McTherapy to go?

Mental Health Nursing,  May/Jun 2002  by Wilkin, Peter

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Editorial

When I were [sic] a lad, we didn't have a telephone - only posh people had telephones. But me and my best mate made a telephone of our own by joining two empty golden syrup cans with a piece of string. We were pretty inseparable and one particular afternoon when we defeated Rommel's Army, our homespun telephone was pivotal to the pincer movement that routed the enemy The grenades (suspiciously like my father's over-ripe tomatoes) rained down on those unsuspecting troops as we bombarded them into submission.

Nowadays, the childhood fantasy games that filled our weekends and the long summer holidays have been downsized to solitary Gameboy encounters. And mobile telephones, loaded with sophisticated functions and gimmicks, sing out their irritating electronic tunes in shops, pubs and trains all around the UK. Each day, we are all potential victims of Nokia's Law (2002).

In responsible hands, telephones have become veritable lifelines, linking the needy and the desperate to other human beings capable of delivering vital interventions. In line with the National Service Framework's call for 24-hour access to mental health services, more and more psychological therapies are being delivered via satellite and cyberspace.

Telephone support lines and the Internet are being utilised in order to increase people's choices and cater for those who are unable to access standardised services. As ever, psychiatric-mental health nurses (PMH Nurses) and their colleagues are putting the needs of patients first and, as an adjunct to their mainstream obligations, are pioneering these diverse therapies. The telephone - and the Internet - are rapidly becoming the transitional objects that serve to fill the anxiety gap between the emotionally distressed patient and the 'absent' yet good-enough clinician.

Whilst there is often a temptation to hark back to `the good old days', it would be quite crass - irreverent, even - to wax lyrical over many of the psychiatric interventions that have masqueraded as 'therapies' in the past. However, despite the examples of good practice in this edition of Mental Health Nursing, I choose to end on a note of caution.

Without the appropriate training, teletherapies could be experienced as dismissive and even dehumanising. My biggest fear is that a general lack of PL MH Nurses will result in these `remote therapies' being offered in place of face-to-face contacts. Rather than liberating the emotionally distressed, these `drive-through' interventions will serve only to canalise people into the iron cage of McDonaldisation - and there is certainly no room in my world for the McPsychiatric Nurse.

Peter Wilkin

References

Nokia's Law (2002) The chances of someone's mobile telephone going off in a meeting or conference are directly proportionate to the projected scale of disruption squared, divided by the number of requests to turn them off.

Copyright Community Psychiatric Nurses Association May/Jun 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved