Fairfield Hospital

 During the last few years that Fairfield Hospital as a psychiatric hospital, I work there as a team administrator for a secure award known as Orchard two.

My role required me to go onto the secure award as part of the team caring for the patients. Typical meeting was attended by a psychiatrist, a psychologist myself, the patient and a representative of social services or other authority care figure such as a provider of social housing for example.

Regularly the medical to the clinical team would visit prisons to make an assessment of potential patients. as upon an initial diagnosis. These patients would be returned to the hospital.. Through writing up the patient symptoms, the psychiatrists and psychologist observations, their diagnosis, treatment, recommendations and treatment plan. I learnt a great deal about mental illness at that time.

Through interactions of friends and family outside of the hospital, as well as third-party services to the hospital, such as caterers, I learned a great deal about stigma and ignorance. When the patients complained about the food, it transpired that the caterers saw no need to make an effort with the food because to them inmate patients at a psychiatric hospital was second-class citizens, something less than human. Did not consider these people would appreciate food anymore than cattlefeed.

Residence of the hospital was sometimes resident for decades. Mini at the freedom of the grounds. A number of them is to pop in to visit me, just for a chat. This is one of the reasons that a panic button was installed in my office. One gentleman would visit me regularly and owing to his suffering from water on the brain, he met me for the first time on each and every occasion.

Friends and family, knowing what I did for a living, would make small talk and the lack of understanding about mental ill illness became a parent. One well, meaning family member was fascinated by schizophrenia, thinking that it was the same thing as multiple of personality disorder.

This is one of the reasons that it has taken many years for people to feel that they can talk openly about their mental health. My own mother lived with bipolar disorder, and she expressed to me that, once upon a time she would simply have been considered mad. That mental health, mental illness continues to be poorly understood was demonstrated by the actions of the palliative care team who prescribed sedatives to her at the hospice, caring for her sedatives turned out to be antidepressants and hugely exacerbated her mania. It transpired that her bipolar disorder has not been taken into account by the doctor prescribing the sedatives.