As a mental health nurse, people don't realise I'm more soldier than nurse

As a mental health nurse, people don't realise I'm more soldier than nurse They imagine me making up beds and giving out medication. They don’t see the steel behind my eyes

When I tell people I am a nurse working on an acute psychiatric ward they often say, “That must be hard”. They imagine something quite different from reality. They see me by the bedside of a crying woman, gently squeezing her hand as she tells me how sad she feels. They do not realise that our depressed service users stopped speaking long before admission, and stopped eating and drinking for that matter.

They see us, mostly young women with kind faces, and imagine us making beds and giving out medication. But what they do not realise is that we are more soldiers than we are nurses. If they looked closer they would see the steel behind our eyes, and a hardness to our faces that was not there when we qualified. Continue reading... The Guardian