What About Me?

Did you know today is Blog Action Day? Join bloggers from around the world and write a post about what inequality means to you. Have you ever encountered it in your daily life?

Inequality is everywhere. If you want to focus on it and not take action, you can find many reason to. But, does it help you grow? Sometimes, realising that life is unfair makes you a stronger person.

My experience of inequality came when I moved to country New South Wales. I was excited. I had never lived in the country—it looked so peaceful and they even had a psychiatric unit. I could work if I wanted to. In the country, few towns have mental health services—something I had never considered before my move.

I loved living in the country when I didn’t work. No traffic. Spending time with the kids and being in my own mum world. Then, I decided to return to work after 12 month and everything changed. Working in mental health in the country was very different to the city. It was the most negative experience of my life. And, to top it off, the other staff had no real psychiatric experience. Some had worked on the unit for many years, but this unit was not a good example of what psychiatric nursing should be.

Its problem was leadership and direction. There was no NUM (nurse unit manager) and we shared 5 fly-in psychiatrists from Sydney—one for each day of the week—with the community mental health team. This meant they each spent 1/2 day at each site. To me, the patients ruled and this was not conducive to recovery. For the first time in my life—my job and opinion was not respected and in the end, I choose to leave the unit and work supporting the chronic psychiatric patients in the community. This made me whole again—from a work prospective until we moved back to the city.

In hindsight, my experience has opened my eyes to how difficult life is, in country Australia. It gives Shannon Noll’s hit “What about me” new meaning.