The Human Behind The Health Professional: Recent Episodes
Harry Christopher
In this podcast Occupational Therapist Harry Christopher conducts Long form interviews with a variety of Health professionals. He speaks to Therapists, Doctors, Nurses, Social Workers, Psychologists, Counsellors and more to find out who they are, what makes them tick, how they cope, and where their human side fits in to some of the most intense working environments.
On the podcast today, we have an interview with Adam Donnarumma, a final year mental health nursing student.
Adam talks of his passion and interest in working with people with people with high mental health needs. We talk about how he got into this line of work and how he has found the last few years of training and studying mental health nursing at university and during practice placements.
This one is a useful reference point for mental health nurses. For people interested in becoming a mental health nurse, or for current health care students of any field or anyone interested in the context of mental health services and what it’s like to work and train as a mental health professional in the UK.
We talk about the experience of being a student in the allied health professions and about the educational culture of the UK system.
We talk about practice placements and what it’s like having a placement educator or mentor.
We talk about balancing academic work and placements and your personal life and the financial side of this.
There’s a discussion about the different therapeutic approaches that mental health professionals might use. And we talk a bit about the idea that psychological and emotional trauma from past experiences should be at the heart of any consideration of mental health problems and in working with people with complex psychological needs.
Related to this point, we reference a few books about this subject. The first is a book by Bessel Van der Kolk called The Body keeps the score: mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. Which Adam highly recommends and talks a bit about in the podcast.
Second, we talk about the influence of Carl Rogers, particularly in relation to person-centred care and the concept of unconditional positive regard.
Two books that you might find useful are: ‘on becoming a person’ which I found to be incredibly powerful both personally and professionally, and another one is ‘client centred therapy’.
Third, we mention the book ‘Loves executioner’ by Irvin Yalom, which is an excellent book of stories of encounters between an experienced psychoanalyst and his patients. It’s very well written and engaging and he uses some quite unconventional practices and techniques in working with his patients, but he also shows great empathy and compassion towards them.
A final book recommendation is ‘The examined life’ by Stephen Grosz which is similar in that it’s a series of stories of patient and therapist encounters. The stories are shorter and simpler but equally compelling.
This episode is an interview with physiotherapist, friend, and ex-colleague, Steve Rogers.
We talk about: Steve’s relationship with his patients. He talks about his struggle with putting on that public face which we do when interacting and treating our patients. Steve talks about the difficulty in switching on and off that public persona, as well as switching on and off his emotions in order to be productive and high functioning at work.
Also, there’s a discussion later on the podcast about mental health, the services which are available in the UK.
Related to our own psychological health, we talk about the tricky process of, as Steve puts it, unravelling the string, or opening those difficult doors, or breaking the old patterns of behaviour and the process of taking responsibility for yourself and your actions.
Steve also touches on the more positive aspects of his working life and being a physiotherapist.
In this opening episode, Harry introduces the podcast and interviews Social Worker and friend Elena P.
They go into depth about Elena's experience of working in frontline child protection as a newly qualified social worker.
We talk about:
- Overwhelming workload pressures.
- Coping mechanisms.
- Anxiety and the body's reaction to stress.
- Gender and its influence on attitudes and approaches to emotional health and awareness of one's body.
- Team dynamics.
- Advice and tips for improving wellbeing at work.
- Identity in relation to work role.