Dr Campling is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who previously ran the Leicester service for people diagnosed with personality disorder. This memoir of her career is wide in scope and also acts, in part, as a call to arms to improve the state of the UK National Health Service today.
It is a book that takes in the past 40 years of psychiatric practice in the UK, beginning in the early 1980s with the reader thrust into Dr Campling's first weekend on-call in an isolated Victorian asylum, and ending in our current era of purported global connectedness, electronic notes and video teleconferencing. This is a story of old brick buildings giving way to new structures imbued with hope. But the familiar patterns set in and things get worse. Forty years on from when she began her career, Dr Campling concludes that things in some respects are still the same. The referral culture can favour exclusion criteria, clinicians battle with a sense of beleaguerment and moral injury, and the working conditions are pushed to the hilt. All this while the waiting list continues to expand. So, what happened? And where do we go from here? The clue is helpfully in the title and in the deeply thoughtful and compassionate way with which Dr Campling writes.
There are moving chapters here based on her time on in-patient wards, in therapeutic communities, forensic settings, young people's units, and even within the brightly lit and noisy interiors of intensive therapy units as the COVID-19 pandemic rages. Best of all is the segment towards the end where Dr Campling sees her therapy patients, who have suffered from COVID-related isolations, under a makeshift awning in her back garden. Both the patients and Dr Campling are freezing cold but value the warmth of human contact. In this way she prioritises the quality of our relationships with each other over the shifting sands of our institutional settings. And it is these relationships, with both their positive and negative aspects, that she encourages us not to turn away from. Don't Turn Away is a fine book and is accessible for the seasoned psychiatrist and general reader alike.
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