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ProNurse Interviews: Stuart Sorensen, Advanced Practitioner in Psychosocial Interventions

ProNurse Interviews: Stuart Sorensen, Advanced Practitioner in Psychosocial Interventions

Stuart Sorenson - Advanced Practitioner in Psychosocial Interventions

ProNurse

Stuart is a very active member of ProNurse and is not shy of putting forward an opinion on anything from the mundane to the controversial. Here we talk to Stuart about being a nurse and running his own business and his personal experience of psychosis.

PN: You initially wanted to be an actor, but say that you weren’t good enough. Considering that acting involves working out how your character would think or behave, does this mean that your move into mental health nursing was a natural progression?

SS: Actually no, although there are some very real links between characterisation and clinical assessment. I was drawn inexorably toward social care, particularly mental health care through the experiences I had as a young man.

The real deciding factor was when I saw a mentally ill woman jump to her death outside the hostel I was living in. I was the first one to her. It was a real life-changing moment.

PN: You state in your ProNurse profile that you ‘worked on psychiatric acute wards until I realised what acute nursing did to me as a person’. Could you expand on this?

SS: Acute psychiatric nursing involves trying to balance several conflicting roles from confidant to jailer, counsellor to bouncer, advocate to doctor’s ‘handmaiden’. The role conflict can become very difficult to deal with. Holding down and injecting someone one day and then trying to counsel them the next brings up some very obvious difficulties.

Some people can thrive on that but I found myself withdrawing emotionally and retreating behind paperwork. In my head I’d basically swapped nursing care for beaurocracy so it was time to get out.

I have huge admiration for those nurses who stay on acute though. I lasted five years but ultimately I had to move on or become ill myself.

PN: You are quite open about the fact that you have been psychotic and that you recovered from it. Could you give us a summary of what you did to facilitate your recovery? Was it due to particular drugs or behavioural changes, or a mixture of both?

SS: No drugs. My psychosis was a reaction to my grandfather’s death when I was 13. I didn’t see a psychiatrist and although I certainly met the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia I learned to cope as I overcame my grief. It took around four years to beat the delusions and come to terms with my voices.

In essence the process was simple enough in theory but can be much more difficult to achieve in practice. The trick is in learning to understand the evidence for what we believe – and if something doesn’t fit the evidence then change the belief.

This is the basic approach of the recovery movement because experiences like voice-hearing for example are less important than the interpretation we give them.

PN: There seems to be a disparity between the recovery rates from mental illnesses in ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. Do you think that this is due to a difference in the general attitude of these different areas?

SS: Absolutely. Recovery, according to World Health Organisation research, is more likely in developing world cultures where people are included and valued. In the UK we create separate ‘patient’ cultures with support groups and day hospitals, all of which emphasise difference, not inclusion.

We also put out a pessimistic message of ‘lifelong illness with a deteriorating course’. That’s the psychiatric equivalent of a death sentence. It inspires neither recovery nor community acceptance.

I think this is why the medicalised West fared so badly in global research such as the WHO’s International Study of Schizophrenia’.

PN: Did the film A Beautiful Mind about the mathematics genius John Nash’s recovery from schizophrenia, or perhaps his ability to live with it, change the public perception of mental illness? Or do people think you need to be a genius to recover from something like schizophrenia?

SS: I never saw the film so I can’t really comment on that. I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to be a genius to recover but ‘therapeutic optimism’, the belief in recovery, is vital.

Basically, people only spend time and effort on projects that they think are possible. It takes real time and effort to recover from schizophrenia and people only go to all that trouble if they believe it’s achievable.

PN: Moving on to your training business. Did you find it challenging to move from being employed as a nurse to running your own business?

SS: Absolutely. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.

Actually I procrastinated about it for years and probably wouldn’t have mustered the courage at all had I not been made redundant in 2006. It wasn’t the work itself, I’d been delivering training for years anyway.

The scary part was the lack of a secure wage. Never before had I worked so hard for so little as I did in the first two years. Had it not been for the support of my good lady, Gill, I’m not sure I’d have got through the very early days at all.

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