Attitudes of qualified versus student mental health nurses towards an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia

Aims: This paper is the report of a study which sought to compare the attitudes held by student and qualified mental health nurses towards individuals with schizophrenia in the Republic of Ireland. Background: Media portrayals of individuals with schizophrenia often include images of aggression and violence. With global initiatives aimed at reducing the stigma and exclusion associated with mental illness, the attitudes of those who care for people with schizophrenia are of particular interest. Methods: A survey was administered to 66 student mental health nurses, and 121 qualified mental health nurses. Participants completed the community attitudes to mental illness scale (CAMI) and the social interaction scale (SIS) in 2009. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to test for the effects of qualification, work setting, years of experience and education on the measures. Results: A statistically significant difference was found between community mental health nurses and those employed in an inpatient setting on the social restrictiveness and community mental health ideology subscales of the CAMI and on the SIS. Findings also showed a statistically significant difference between nurses in the 10-14 years of experience group and the 5-9 years of experience group on the SIS. Conclusions: Mental health nurses employed in an inpatient setting are often confronted with patients who have challenging behavioural presentations which may explain their socially restrictive attitudes. However, nurses must be alerted to the fact that such negative attitudes may adversely affect the therapeutic relationship and ultimately lead to stigmatisation and its negative consequences.

The Housing Triangulation: A discourse on Quality, Affordability and Lifestyles in India

Since 1991 with the advent of globalization and economic liberalisation, basic conceptual and discursive changes are taking place in housing sector in India. The new changes suggest how housing affordability, quality and lifestyles reality is shifting for various segments of the population. Such shift not only reflects structural patterns but also stimulates an ongoing transition process. The paper highlights a twin impetus that continue to shape the ongoing transition: expanding middle class and their wealth - a category with distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits and corresponding ‘market defining’ of affordable housing standards - to articulate function of housing as a conceptualization of social reality in modern India. The paper highlights the contradictions and paradoxes, and the manner in which the concept of affordability, quality and lifestyles are embedded in both discourse and practice in India. The housing ‘dream’ currently being packaged and fed through to the middle class population has an upper middle class bias and is set to alienate those at the lower end of the middle-and low-income population. In the context of growing agreement and inevitability of market provision of ‘affordable housing’, the unbridled ‘market-defining’ of housing quality and lifestyles must be checked.

Holding eternity in an hour: A practical exploration of the arts in the health care of older people with dementia

This project involved creative artists working with older people with dementia and staff from two Belfast Health and Social Care Trust supported housing centres in a mixed programme of dance, painting, music and drama which culminated in an open workshop with relatives and friends of the tenants. The study steered away from traditional medical models of art/music/dance therapy where the participant is perceived as a ‘patient’ in favour of identifying the participant as a ‘student’ who avails of a life-long learning experience. A key premise was that access to the arts is a human right, especially in the context of advancing age and cognitive impairment. . According to one the tenants of Mullan Mews, the project served to ‘awaken - or reawaken - folk with dementia to the endless vista of possibility already in their lives if they will only look for it’. A phenomenographic analysis of video data generated by the project emphasises the importance of the individual experiences of participants in the programme. The evidence from these storylines gained strength from the development of a documentary-style film text that has proved successful in capturing and translating the live experience of the project participants into a supportive text that goes beyond the written word.