Mental Health Conversations
Being a psychiatric nurse is a privilege. Everyone has the right to live a mentally healthy life and feel empowered to achieve whatever they’re capable of. And when someone needs a little help to get to that point, nurses are there to help.
In this series, we will bring you inside the doors of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, meeting nurses from across the service, and some of the people who have spent time in their care.
Together, we shed light on what it really means to be a mental health nurse today – the rewards and challenges of the role, the deep impact that nurses can make, and where psychiatric nursing is going in the future.
Whether you're a seasoned nurse, a nursing student, or a mental health advocate, Mental Health Conversations brings us together to be informed, inspired and empowered.
Mental Health Conversations is a brand new podcast series brought to you by St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, Ireland’s largest independent mental health service.
Mental Health Conversations
Ep3 - Caring for adults with anxiety through CBT and Virtual Reality
Anxiety disorders can have a profound effect on our lives, and at St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, we offer specialised treatment for people experiencing them.
On this episode of Mental Health Conversations, Shane Kirwan meets Frank Smith, Clinical Nurse Manager 2 on our Anxiety Disorders Programme. They discuss the various difficulties that the programme is designed to treat, some of the key ideas behind Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), how care is structured and what it involves. We also hear stories of successful recovery.
More recently, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been emerging as a way of supporting treatment of certain anxiety-related conditions, such as phobias. Frank describes an innovative new VR treatment being used in St Patrick’s, and we hear a first-hand account of the technology in action with Orlaith Grehan of our Communications team.
We also explore two of the other specialised services and treatments that we offer in St Patrick’s by visiting our special care unit and learning more about Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT).
Mental Health Conversations is a brand new podcast series brought to you by St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, Ireland’s largest independent mental health service.