Buddleia Dance on the Asylum: a Nurse's Journey Through a Mental Hospital

This is an authentic account of a professional s experience of the mental health industry beginning in the early nineteen seventies when, as a young man from a disturbed background, he fails to reach university and seeks employment as a porter in a mental hospital. The hospital community seems the equivalent of a sprawling, international family: culturally diverse, eccentric, benevolent and dysfunctional. The callow youth embraces this representation of a family and its inimitable characters, and the illuminating field of mental disorder, in what he comes to own as a personal sense of asylum. He embarks on a mental nurse training despite the controlled and impoverished conditions so detrimental to the patients lives and recovery. He then experiences the evolving, civilising developments which slowly transform the staff-centred regime and which eventually leads to the closure of the hospital for good. Within the hospital s grounds, a modern forensic unit is built in its stead. He eventually, turns to the discipline of psychotherapy in order to work more therapeutically but this only accentuates the dilemmas in current mental health care. Throughout the journey, the wild shrub of the Buddleia is a metaphor for the striving institutions, staff, patients and himself, trying to survive and thrive in an inhospitable world