Citation

Spencer SJ. Int. J. Soc. Psychiatry 1975; 21(2): 98-100.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1975, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

1193788

Abstract

I have tried to describe just less than one year of learning experience on my part in one type of adolescent unit. Only 16 inpatients were treated at a time while I was there: there were only 25 discharges and 19 admissions in my time. We knew we were making little inroad into our whole regional problem of adolescent disturbance; but we believe that as a team, able to work closely with each other and with our patients and their relatives, in a therapeutic community of undogmatic ideology, we were able to give a little to almost all and, to those who did best, a great deal. Very few ex-inpatients lost all touch with us. Nearly all came back from scattered homes for our Christmas discotheque. Even our very modest aim, to reset and then foster the natural development of the personalities of our patients, rather than break them down in deep analysis and radically reconstruct them, required an intensity of psychotherapeutic effort which engaged all we had to offer, and often drained us at the end of the day. Yet those who joined us transiently, particularly student nurses and medical students, seemed to find the experience significant--occasionally deeply so--and came back to visit us. Our social worker has now departed to have a baby. Our three senior nurses have left, two to university as mature students, one to prepare for a no. 7 post. Possibly the intensity of the demand upon them would have made them leave, anyway. For myself, it was a year of development of my psychotherapeutic sensitivity and of close working with a valued team of colleagues in a setting new to me, which I shall never forget.

Language: en