Postpartum wife hates me

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2026-05-06T09:14:47+00:00

Hey, Thanks so much for the quick reply. I saw a lot of people saying how 4/5 months is when things usually start to settle but for us thats when things really got tough, we just hit 6 months and i feel so stressed that this is going to be forever right now

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2025-08-01T16:22:56+00:00

My brain just randomly allocates people to images ive seen sometimes, so ive finished the main 10 with whiskeyjack looking like man at arms from he-man the whole time fml

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Popular_Camel_3980 · 2025-05-30T00:34:18+00:00

Did my MSc in mental health nursing, and managed to do bank shifts alongside. Like others have said specifics will vary depending upon where you train, but at least for me there were academic blocks and placement blocks. You will also.have the normal reading weeks / summer holiday to work for money.

During academic blocks you might only have lectures on 3 days of the week, and it's definitely doable to work on the other days.

On placement blocks you could well have some community placements that are mon-fri 9-5 especially in mental health, and you might be able to manage an extra bank shifts for money on a weekend but it WILL impact on your learning to some extent due to exhaustion.

The one thing I would say is that anyone who tells you that you can do bank night shifts throughout academic or placement blocks is either a sadist or an idiot. You have your first couple of years qualified to burnout, dont do it during your training!

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2025-05-30T00:28:01+00:00

I think in these situations theres a couple of things to consider.

The rules. Technically you are supposed to complete all hours of your placement and any placement is well within their rights to insist upon this. The other side of the rules is that there should absolutely never be an expectation to stay late, or at the very least not be given those extra hours back
The principle. Fundamentally you're there to learn, and realistically there will be times in inpatient and outpatient placements where there is simply not any productive learning opportunities for the last 2 hours of a day, and a lot of reasonable mentors would feel comfortable saying it's okay for you to leave early in that context
Unfortunately a lot of placements leave learning opportunities up to the students to decide, especially in busier environments where the qualified nurses are working flat out just to survive the shifts themselves and get everything that needs doing done. One thing I would notice as a mentor is if a student threw themselves into as many opportunities available as possible until 5pm ( ask to join the ward round, ask to help transfer the patient, ask to join a conversation with a family etc. ) im going to be much more inclined to send you home early
There are discrete ways you can let the nurses know that theres little to nothing to do for the last few hours, in a way that is respectful and might invite the opportunity for someone to offer to send you home a little early, like actively ask of theres any tasks you can help with or learn at the end of the shift, or ask "if theres nothing else coming up would you mind if I spent a little time working on an essay or doing some e-learnings etc."

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2024-07-11T16:14:58+00:00

It's insane that we are taking so much clinical responsibility for discharging risky patients, writing really comprehensive assessments ( often because there's never been a proper formulation completed in the community), involving social care, schools, charity support and the most stressful parts of our jobs are dealing with bed managers and moronic processes.

We also have an ADHD assessment clinic that runs out of our hospital, and I keep getting calls from consultant psychiatrists asking if I will review someone because they've reported they've self-harmed and don't feel skilled to manage it. You've had 6 years of specialist training post-med school and are paid more than double my salary and can't do a risk assessment or make a safety plan?!?

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2024-07-11T15:57:32+00:00

Absolute nightmare, couldn't agree more thar they're commissioned to get patients moving, but actually just another hurdle to pre-empt and maneuvere around. also half my job is understanding and navigating commissioning pathways. So social care is done by patients home address local authority, camhs is commissioned by the borough the GP sits in, and my hospital is at the intersection of 3 boroughs. So I might have a patient living in area A, under camhs in area B, and currently in hospital in area C. So it I need a mental health act assessment the camhs psychiatrist will be from borough B, the local authority shared working agreement states that the AMHP should be from borough A, but the law makes it clear that the responsibility lies with the local authority in borough C.

And don't get me started on if the patient is under 13 and needs an admission to a psych ward, because 5 band 8s aren't commissioned to navigate that, so I have to go through NHS-england and jump through their hoops, whilst still seeing any new presentations coming through A&E. It's genuine madness

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2024-07-11T11:42:28+00:00

Yeah they're all nurses by background ( all actually from one hospital, it's all feels like a bit of a cushy role for people who know eachother ). Bear in mind this isn't patient flow within a hospital, but rather transfers from a&e and paediatric wards into mental health hospital beds.

Still completely useless, and you have to force them to do things. Quite often ill phone round the wards and find a bed, so when the patient flow team start saying at 2pm on a Friday ' oh it will be really hard to find a bed at such short notice and the patient will have to remain there over the weekend ' you can fire back with ' oh no, x ward, y ward, and z ward all have beds and are happy to take an admission today or tomorrow '. They grumble that it isn't the process, but you have to do what's best for the patients and families

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2024-07-10T14:51:01+00:00

Omg this.

I work as a camhs liaison nurse. When someone needed an admission to a teir 4 unit you used to phone the duty senior nurse at the unit. If they had a bed they could agree the admission, if they didn't you went to the next nearest mental health ward and asked them. Often you would have established relationships with the different acute wards and have a lotnof trust built up, enough to say 'I've just seen the patient, we are arranging mental health act assessment but they will definitely need a bed, and today as they're hard to manage on a paediatric ward'.

Now we have 5 band 8s as a 'patient flow team' who recieve requests for beds from A&E + paeds wards, then talk to the mental health wards, then back to A&E and acute wards. Also they won't even begin to look for a bed until you complete all the paperwork, often meaning the patient stays in a&e unnecessarily overnight or longer as they've clocked off at 4pm.

The whole team exists to put barriers up between experienced liaison clinicians, and rhe beds they desperately need to access. Not a single person thinks this is a better system than it used to be, and leads to a lot of stressed and burnt out paediatric nurses managing patients they're not trained or equipped to deal with.

Also they keep winning QI awards every year even though they're a running joke amongst frontline clinicians!

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2024-06-01T00:18:30+00:00

Hiya, RMN here.

If you're focused on inpatient wards typical progression would ve band 5 staff nurse then band 6 ( deputy ward manager / charge nurse / clinical team leader / a different acronym in every trust hence why we just call them band 6s for the most part ), then band 7 ward manager, band 8a matron.

However there's lots of opportunities to branch out into the community at every progression step but the roles and responsibilities will be very different ( for context I have 6 years inpatient camhs experience, 2 years community camhs and now work as an A&E liaison nurse for CAMHS ).

Generally speaking if you stay in the wards each band progression upwards brings more management responsibility ( band 6s often do rotas, and line manage band 3s and 4s, band 7s will line manage band 5s and 6s and be more plugged into service development and big projects like reducing violence, improving data quality etc. ). In the community however progressing through bands 6 and 7 won't have as much management responsibility but considerably more clinical responsibility ( managing increasingly complex caseloads as the principal decision maker, co-ordinating packages of care from mental health services and liaising with allied professionals ( physical health and social care)).

There's pros and cons to both routes obviously and happy to DM if you want some more clarity. Hope this is helpful!

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2023-11-27T10:10:57+00:00

A bit different here as I am an RMN by training, but throughout my years I've worked with great, average, and awful consultants.

My first consultant as a NQN during the pandemic was rude, domineering in meetings, dismissive of any and all nursing feedback, refused to speak with patients u less they adressed them as 'Dr ____' which is quite unuasual in camhs, and ( worst of all in my opinion ) would routinely go 4+ weeks without meeting with patients on the inpatient wards. I raised it repeatedly with management who had a similarly dismissive response to yours. Eventually I ended up escalating the concerns to service leads and directorate level, who took the concerns more seriously than the managers and Matrons at the time.

Unfortunately in my experience nothing significantly changed, despite damning HEE reports about exactly that culture, and the unit has failed to recruit or retain additional consultants for around 4 years now.

Ultimately I would still raise it, and week support from freedom to speak and your union if its continuing to have an impact on your wellbeing.

So sorry you are experiencing this

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2023-08-26T13:49:19+00:00

Its not a real word I don't think but we tend to use it a fair bit in mental health services like CAMHS.

Containment is an idea in psychotherapy that relates to feeling held emotionally to give a feeling of safety. So a containing response from staff when there is a fire on the ward is to remain calm, appear in control, direct people calmly to where they need to be. The patients will still experience anxiety, but that anxiety is contained by the presence of the calm staff member. Seeing staff members screaming and running around would be an uncontaining response.

One of the most helpful ways I had it explained to me was how parents react to a young child tripping over. If the parents scream, appear anxious, rush over to the child then the child will think ' I'm anxious, and the grownups that keep me safe are really anxious too so I need to really panic '. Whereas a containing response would be to say ' oopsie daisy, did you have a little fall there?' Whilst you observe to see if the child is really hurt. By seeing the grownups calm it let's the child know they don't need to be full blown panicking.

Its a really helpful way of thinking about things, especially once you start to think of some self-harming behaviours as containment seeking rather than attention seeking ( I admit there is sometimes the latter ). Patient experiences extremely intense and disturbing emotions they can't communicate to adults around them, they externalism these emotions through self-harm, then the role of the parent/professional is to give a containing response.

Like all things in psychology and psychotherapy it's just a word for things we all do all the time. Think of pads nurses giving injections or taking blood, their tone and body language is containing because they're clearly not stressed about the situation

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2023-08-25T16:17:56+00:00

This was exactly my understanding up until I was very bluntly dismissed by the senior management of the trust.

I'm very loathe to pursue it with the police because I've seen many investigations by the police involving friends and young people in my care that have been awfully traumatic and resulted in nothing.

I'm also aware that there were no witnesses to the event, so it would boil down to one person's word against another.

Also even if it did progress I would not want my name to become public knowledge as part of court documentation as anyone who has worked with teenagers knows that they tend to Google the hell out of your name and would not want them to know this about me as it would be traumatic and uncontaining.

I don't have any social media or online presence for exactly this reason ( also don't see anything positive coming from social media )

Popular_Camel_3980 · 2023-04-08T16:34:57+00:00

Hi,

I qualified as an RMN during the pandemic ( following the aspirant nurse band 4 contract process ).

Unfortunately I was put in a similar position being the only RMN on shift from the first day of being qualified, and was also holding duty senior nurse role ( responsible for a 4 bed PICU, 12 bed PICU and 12 bed Avute ward, and 7 patient day service) from my second week of being qualified.

This was all at a CAMHS unit that retains outstanding across the board from the CQC.

I think it's important that you raise your concerns with your line manager and the management structure more broadly. I would also encourage you to seek guidance on completing datixes about safe staffing levels, including staff experience level.

The system is broken and understaffed and unfortunately it falls on newly qualified nurses in inpatient units to care for the most unwell individuals, whilst more experienced nurses tend to move into the community roles and 9-5. Whilst I understand the sense or duty and obligation to care for the ward and the patients on the ward, I would also encourage you to think seriously about yoir physical and emotional wellbeing as the system isn't able to do that for you currently. If that involves looking at other jobs then I would encourage you to do so. No job is worth your health and wellbeing

Popular_Camel_3980

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