Containing Anxiety at the Crisis Centre

My background is in psychiatric nursing, and it is through my training as a psychiatric nurse that I came to do a placement at the Arbours Crisis Centre, before becoming a resident therapist. I did not realize how influenced I was by the implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions held by the discourses of psychiatry and nursing, nor how some of these attitudes mirrored my own attitudes and ways of coping. Some of the aims of psychiatric nursing are to make people feel better, eliminate symptoms, control feelings, get rid of or suppress difficult feelings, and maintain a ‘professional’ distance (which involves not becoming involved with nor emotionally impacted by the patients). I wanted to think that these were aims I never believed in, but they proved hard to shake off. They even at times felt more ‘sensible’ than living with disturbance in the way we do at the Crisis Centre. At times I've longed for the security of psychiatric terminology, hospital procedures, and the certainty (however illusory that is) offered by these ways of thinking about and responding to emotional distress. At times the Crisis Centre has felt like a ‘mad’ place from which I've wanted to escape.

The response by mainstream psychiatric services is often to treat the feelings felt by the guest and those around them as abnormal and dangerous, something to be somehow got rid of. The anxiety felt by hospital staff is alleviated by adherence to a variety of procedures, which constitute the very fabric of the hospital structure. At the Crisis Centre we try to hold anxiety for our guests in a different way. We aim to contain it in ways which give the guests the opportunity to begin to find ways of eventually containing it themselves. Guests need to come to the Crisis Centre generally because they need to be ‘inside’ somewhere, or something safe. Hospital can provide asylum/sanctuary in a certain way and to a certain extent. Patients are kept physically safer in hospital through the use of external co