I worked as an OT in a home health agency that did psychiatric care. We had 2 psych nurses who saw a lot of patients and I came in and did OT when appropriate. I also worked in a sub-acute/long-term care facility for patients with mental illness for 3 years.

In both jobs I had times that I shone because my mental illnesses made me understand how to treat patients better than others. I had a few really impressive successes with people who had been pretty much given up on. I also had patients who seemed to sense my own symptoms and fed off them and that generally led to the patient becoming uncooperative and then quitting treatment and complaining about me for something that was generally not true or not an issue. (I remember one complained because I opened her pill box and pointed out she hadn't taken her AM meds; another refused visits for 2-3 weeks and then complained I was bossy when I told her that she needed to let me come sometime that week or I had to discharge her. (That lady it was really about smoking; I have severe allergic asthma and can't be around smokers and she couldn't go an hour without smoking. It was sad because I think I could have helped her more with a good nicotine level but not if I were dead from status asthmaticus.)

The things I was generally good at were things like noticing depression before anyone else did. Especially in home health where I was allowed to give a depression inventory I got a lot of people some help that they really needed. Once in the long-term place I had a patient who got violent in the halls; I finally realized she was very light-sensitive and that was why she was beating people up when she was out with the skylights. I then realized I'd had the same issue on Geodon and surprise! she was on Geodon. I went through a very goofy thing to get her help; I told a nurse who knew about my bipolar and had her claim that she looked it up and saw the side effect and maybe it was worth trying sunglasses or something else. The med was changed and that was the end of the violence.

So you kind of constantly draw from your own experiences and it's both good and bad. I had a hard time with people who weren't motivated because I know that motivation is the only thing that has kept me going. So when people wanted to give up I had a hard time sometimes being patient. It was my job to find some reason to not want to give up but that can be very hard to do sometimes.

Other times it is so easy. One person had become completely overwhelmed by her mail, especially those freebie name/address labels from charities. The more depressed she got the less she could sort through it and the more it was taking over her living room. So that's what we did, we worked on sorting and motivation to do a certain amount per day and having an I don't know pile to get help with and just talked a lot about how to care with the depression she'd had for a long time. Psych RN did a lot more counseling about handling the depression. Overall that was a really positive outcome after about 3 months of work from the psych RN and I. I think of her often b/c I see her home often.

I guess I'm saying that it is a good area to work in and your experiences will help you. In my experience my experiences also hurt me sometimes. It was hard to keep a boundary between what I wanted to tell patients and what I could; I know sometimes it would have helped to know about my illness and that I was doing ok but it wasn't the right thing to do either. Sometimes they kind of guessed. I loved the work but it was exhausting, the home health much less the long-term care. (But I only did psych probably 3-5 hours per week in that job). It was hard to teach skills I didn't always have myself.

But it is very rewarding, often very positive, very often quite funny and I'm so glad that I had the experiences I did. When I started in psych it was a fast transfer due to staffing issues and nobody thought to tell me it was psych. I figured it out the first hallway I walked down and panicked because I didn't know how to do this. But I learned and loved it. I left the long-term only bc the drive was too far. Home health I left b/c that's what I was doing when I became unable to work at all.