His association with the PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL started back in 1970. Since then, Bentley Haynes has moved from trainee nursing assistant to acting deputy director, consistently championing the cause of treating and returning mental health patients to their homes and families.
Haynes, who started with no experience in the field, furthered his studies by completing the Registered Mental Health Nursing Course and becoming a nurse in 1974. He has also studied Human Resource Management and Public Sector Management and took up his current duties in July this year, all the while remaining a strong advocate for community health nursing.
Although he got into mental health nursing by chance, Haynes said he would not trade the experience for anything. His outlook on life is rooted in his mother’s teaching him to always be a loving person, and working at the hospital has taught him to understand and appreciate people and life.
He recalled that he wanted to follow his friends and become a police officer or work in the hotel industry but as fate would have it, there was a male nurse in his community who told him to apply to the hospital and he got the job when he left school as a 19-year-old.
As a teenager and “a skinny guy like me in the hospital,” as Haynes put it, “it was scary”, but there were some other guys in his age group and he soon blended in. The older people also embraced the youngsters and guided them on the job, making it an enjoyable experience.
Haynes said that right around the time he started, academics were added to the field of mental health nursing, which led to the incorporation of the nursing process into mental health care.
He said they started looking at the total person and found that with the changes over time, treatment has resulted in better outcomes.
He said that in order to effectively treat patients, the single most important thing is to understand that they are human.
“Even in the orientation of students [they are made] to understand that they are dealing with human beings and if that is understood, half of everything they will do is solved already. You could be treating your mother, father, sister or close relative.
“There is a term that people use – ‘once mad, always mad’ – and we try to get that out of our ready vocabulary because if you think that way, you would not be thinking of any improvement in [patients],” Haynes said.
He said that when a person comes in for treatment, the hospital needs to know the closeness of his or her family unit because family plays a major role in the person’s progress and the success of their treatment plan.
If you can get relatives to understand that the mental patient is suffering from an illness just like any other, it is easier to nurse people at home than in a hospital setting.
If the patient is among family, s/he feels more comfortable because the separation from community and family could be detrimental.
He said that if a person is giving a lot of trouble at home, the family may not want him/her back, so s/he is sometimes kept in the hospital a little longer. The hospital needs to convince them to take the family member back into the home.
He praised the community nursing programme, which is driven by mental health reform and community-based nursing and programmes. There are 16 community mental health nurses across the island who function from polyclinics and visit homes and schools.
The whole idea is looking at mental health wellness – that it is better to prevent a disorder or detect it early.
He said that the hospital has about 540 resident patients, mostly men 17 years old and up to their early 40s, being treated mostly for problems with marijuana, cocaine and alcohol use.
