The Language of Kindness

by Christie Watson

‘Much of psychiatry is taking away a person’s power when they are ill, and giving it back to them in manageable bites as they get better.’

one in four of us gets ill enough to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition.

There is no greater expression of pain than a person who eats so little they may die. Or eats so much they may die. Obesity is self-harm. Addiction is self-harm. We hurt ourselves in different ways to express such emotional pain.

‘Education and health are one and the same. A basic human right. A child in hospital should have more than the basic human rights honoured,’ a hospital teacher tells me.

‘the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures’.

The horror of our bodies – our humanity, our flesh and blood – is something nurses must bear, lest the patient think too deeply, remember the lack of dignity that makes us all vulnerable. It is our vulnerability that unites us. Promoting dignity in the face of illness is one of the best gifts a nurse can give.

It can kill a child within hours. Sepsis is a disease that kills eight million people globally per year, one death every 3.5 seconds. It is an immune response triggered by an infection that has entered the bloodstream, caused by bacteria, fungus, virus or parasites.

Domestic violence is the leading cause of death in Europe of women aged eighteen to forty-four, ahead of road-traffic accidents; ahead of cancer.

The NHS spends £820 million a year on keeping older patients in hospital when they no longer need acute treatment. There is inadequate funding in community healthcare, and the health system is buckling under this pressure.

Hiraeth is a Welsh word for nostalgia, or a longing for something you can never return to or that never was. I hope we can return to kindness, if it existed.