THIN

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.