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Sometimes I can’t help but question my job. I work with mentally ill patients who are typically at their worst. Recently one of my coworkers was severely injured at work as a result of a patient. Since then myself and other colleagues have questioned the safety of our jobs. We are supposed to be treating people with mental illness, and I understand that mental illness and substance/alcohol abuse goes hand in hand, it’s hard to determine which came first at lot of times. It’s like the chicken or the egg. Anymore though we seem to treat more and more people who are substance abusers and those who are trying to avoid jail or prison. It feels more like a rehab and a jail than it does an inpatient unit at a hospital. There is a trend of increasingly more violent people coming through and the question arises are we properly trained to deal with this type of population. We go through training and we have to physically restrain people from time to time but anymore it seems like the training is not up to par with the people we are treating. Do you justify letting someone who willfully and knowingly attacked someone else try to calm themselves down or do protect them and everyone else by physical restraints. De-escalation works don’t get me wrong but at that point I can’t help but think it’s too little too late for that. Then you get into another sort of ethical issue of how  do you properly train your staff to handle situations that get physical and making sure that they are given the tools and techniques to protect themselves while at the same time not being violent towards the patient? I am in school working towards a nursing degree and psychology is by background. I have pondered whether or not I want to do psych nursing but lately after the increase in violence and lack of suitable treatment for the type of population we are now dealing with it has made me question that thought.  None of us have seen violence to this degree and that has resulted in such severity. It really has shaken us to the core. I would like to think we do good work and I know that the group of people I work with, who are like second family, are the best to work with and can’t imagine working with anyone else and to seeing one of our own get hurt is tragic. We deal with a lot of crap and very sick and difficult people, and we sure don’t get paid enough, but hopefully at the end of the day it matters.