Mental Stress

I am watching NASCAR http://www.nascar.com/en_us/sprint-cup-series.html tonight.  The race is in Darlington, SC, "the track too tough to tame." The announcers are stressing the impact that mental stress has on the drivers and other team members.

We discount mental stress too much.  I think I wrote recently about how much mental stress I was experiencing when I was having regular hip pain. It wore me out mentally, and I did not realize how much until I had a pain management treatment and was experiencing minimal pain.  What an enlightenment to me.

I work in a psychiatric prison hospital, and we see many, many patients who come to our unit and immediately feel safer and better.  A prison is a high stress environment.  It is staff against offenders in many ways. Prisons are filled with bad actors and predators who almost unconsciously pick out easily victimized offenders.  At the unit where I work there are more safe guards, more correctional staff and more clinical staff so even the easily victimized or weak offenders can seek help.

Yet, we stabilize these patients and send them back into the same stressful environment. True the psychiatric prison hospital is not designed to be a permanent unit of assignment.  It is difficult to think that the patients we discharge who could not deal with the stress for long before will now be able to deal with it.  I try to educate them about how they can get sent back to the psychiatric prison hospital without doing high risk self injurious or injurious to others behavior.  Some times that helps. Sometimes it does not.

I do not appreciate for myself what my mental stressors are, and do not acknowledge them usually.  But, as with everyone else, I do have them.  And, when I try to deal with my stressors, sometimes I feel stronger, have more energy and feel more confident.

This is something I need to pay attention to in the future.