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.