In 2018, Christie Watson’s memoir about what it means to be a nurse became a publishing sensation, spending more than five months in the bestseller lists. The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story was tenderly distilled from the two decades that Watson had worked for the NHS, capturing the essence – and importance – of what it means to care for patients. Counsellor Bella Jackson will presumably be hoping that her account of two years spent training as a mental health nurse will resonate in a similar way.
Jackson worked in social care for five years before embarking on her nursing degree. The book is “pieced together from scattered notebooks and scribble”. But from the outset, it is not entirely clear what is fact and what is fiction. She explains that she has constructed three “composite” settings from her contemporaneous notes: an acute psychiatric ward, an A&E department and a community psychiatric team. Although based on real situations, the stories she tells are also composites in which names and identifying details are changed. So too are the healthcare professionals depicted.
