Therapeutic Relationships in Mental Health Settings 2023
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
Therapeutic Relationships in Mental Health Settings 2023
Delivered Online via Zoom
Recording available for 1 week to all registered participants
This eight part course is aimed at nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, occupational therapists, social workers and other mental health practitioners.
Marcus Evans, psychoanalyst, will be in conversation with mental health nurses Joan Osimuwa and Siobhan Bryant.
Chaired by Jacqueline Bristow
Everyone working in mental health knows how emotionally taxing that work can be. There’s something fundamentally different to working in physical medicine. We’re not dealing with patients who “have” an illness, but with people whose difficulties are central to their personality, their emotional experience and their ways of relating. In working with them, we get deeply affected and we might get embroiled in ways that make things worse. Relationships are central to the work. If we understand what happens between our patients and us, in ourselves, and between staff, we can be of much more help to them. Psycho-analysis offers such ways of understanding, and this is what this course aims to do.
Jacqueline Bristow is a Psychoanalyst, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and Co-Head of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. Her background is as a Psychiatrist, and she has worked for many years in community and hospital NHS mental health settings. She has an interest in the use of psychoanalytic thinking in reflective practice, and Balint groups.
Marcus Evans trained as a mental health nurse. He became interested in understanding what psychiatric patients communicate and turned to psychoanalysis for that. He trained as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and later as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has – quite uniquely – managed to bridge mental health nursing and psychoanalysis: He was the Head of the Nursing Discipline at the Tavistock Clinic for 20 years and for a while an Associate Clinical Director there. He was one of the founders of the Tavistock’s Fitzjohn’s Service for the treatment of patients with severe personality disorder. He has designed and taught courses for front line staff in different settings for the last 25 years and has extensive experience in offering supervision and reflective practice to staff teams in mental health settings. He’s published two books: ‘Making Room for Madness in Mental Health: the psychoanalytic understanding of psychotic communications’, and now – it’s just come out last week – “Psychoanalytic Thinking in Mental Health Settings.”
Joan Osimuwa is an inpatient Matron at Lambeth Hospital. She has worked in different mental health settings, on inpatient wards and in community mental health teams and has been the ward manager of female psychiatric wards. She is now a Practice Experience Manager, working with universities to provide placements for students and support them and she trains clinical staff to become practice assessors and supervisors.
Siobhan Bryant is trained both as a general and a mental health nurse. She worked at the Cassel Hospital, in a therapeutic community, with adults and adolescents with personality disorder. For the last ten years, she has worked in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, as a senior nurse and psychodynamic counsellor, working with young people in schools and the community, with university students and with teachers.
