THIN

[Gratefully2years]

So I am 100 days post PNAP. I watched the documentary Thin in which the patient (a nurse) tells the nurse that she is a nurse and took insulin from work to try to kill her self. She was not reported to the BON. So question diverting Insulin versus Morphin does the board not care that there are nurse with eating disorders that are diverting Insulin, Lasix, and Thyroid to be thin? 

[Gratefully2years]

@hppygr8ful and @cynical-RN my eating disorder started at 12 years old and yes my childhood was chaotic and abusive. Here in my opinion is the reason I still struggle and it’s the biggest reason I tell people in a young girls life that early treatment is critical, I did not get treatment for 5 years. So in those 5 years this became habit. In my 30 years of struggle the only thing that silenced that very loud voice was drugs. This is so common in eating disorders, substance abuse. I do not talk to people about my ED even if I am at a under weight cycle and people say something I am like oh yeah overworked and brush it off. 
I would love it if our coworkers and colleagues in nursing did not look down on any other nurse for any psychiatric illness just like we don’t look down on people with diabetes type 2 or hypertension clearly caused by lifestyle. 
 

what is interesting is one would think that women with eating disorders today would be helped by the shift with body image being larger and a BMI of say 20 being seen as skinny. It doesn’t because that is not the reason. My why boils down to wanting to be numb to my emotions and wanting to be invisible. So interesting now a BMI of 17 is seen as crazy thin whereas in the 90s that was seen as just thin. So yeah the whole I want to be thin due to society is not accurate in the majority of eating disorders. 

[Guest856929]

15 hours ago, hppygr8ful said:

Psych nurse and recovering alcoholic/California monitoring contract graduate here...... This all boils down to these programs not being individualized. The BONs certainly do care if a nurse's practice is impacted in an unsafe way by a mental health diagnosis and there are nurses I went through this with who had eating disorders, BPD, Bi-polar etc.....When they are reported they get the same choices that nurse impacted by substance use, but the programs are all cut with the same cookie cutter. However I bolded the sentence above because it shows how little even nurses know about mental health diagnoses. Anorexia Nervosa is rarely fuled by Psychosis and should not be lumped in with people who suffer from psychosis. They are different conditions and treated differently. I wish these treatment programs looked at the root cause of these problems. With some exceptions almost all addictions and anorexia can be seen as an addiction are about the patient having  a perception of control and  stem from a time or place where the patient felt they were powerless and afraid. Almost all addicts/alcoholics have one or more Adverse Childhood Events in their back ground. 

We do need to care about and help eachother but to do that we need to educate ourselves about addctions and their root causes. I am an outspoken advocate for nurses receiving actual help for addiction related factors such as ACE, PTSD, CPTSD etc...... but the fact remains that the nurse who is suffering/recovering stays silent as they are so often seen as damaged goods by colleagues who should know better. I highly recomend everyone either dealing with certain types of mental health issues read, 

The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van der Kolk, MD. It is an exstremely enlightening look at the role played by ACEs in the development of mental health issues. 

Hppy

I used psychosis connotatively, not its denotative meaning in the medical sense. If someone is perceiving himself/herself as "fat" and they take insulin to maintain metabolism, then his/her eating disorder is induced by the dysfunction of his/her mental state that I chose to refer as psychosis informally. I was not implying that anorexia is generated from psychosis, albeit it has a significant component of mental health attached to it despite many of its manifestations being primarily physical. 

[hppygr8ful, ASN, RN, EMT-I]

1 hour ago, cynical-RN said:

I used psychosis connotatively, not its denotative meaning in the medical sense. If someone is perceiving himself/herself as "fat" and they take insulin to maintain metabolism, then his/her eating disorder is induced by the dysfunction of his/her mental state that I chose to refer as psychosis informally. I was not implying that anorexia is generated from psychosis, albeit it has a significant component of mental health attached to it despite many of its manifestations being primarily physical. 

I totally get you and understand your comment it's just there is so much stigma and misunderstanding around mental illness from general opublic and professional spere as well. We all need to educate ourselves. According to the Institue for Mental Health 1 in 5 adults currently suffer from or will suffer from a mental illness in their lifetime. 

I know you meant only the best so no harm no foul, but I do so ofen see and hear professional people misused mental health nomenclature which just adds to the problem.

Hppy