The pandemic has brought with it a steep rise in people experiencing mental health issues. As a result, public mental health services are being flooded. Even before COVID-19, mental health nurses were struggling to keep up but now we are drowning.

We are being forced to push people out of the units faster and faster to make space for the next person who needs a bed. Even if this means discharging people to unsafe environments that contributed to their mental health issues, or if they are still mentally unwell and a risk to themselves or others. Nurses are leaving mental health en masse, and as a result mental health units are chronically understaffed. Those of us who stayed are working with increasingly unsustainable workloads, expected to do the same amount of work each shift with fewer the nurses. We can no longer guarantee safety for our patients or ourselves, with incidences of aggression becoming not just daily but every shift.

We feel like we are failing every single patient that comes into our beds. They came to get help, to find a way to get better. But with things the way they are, mental health nurses have become at best bandaids on bleeding stumps and at worst are just working in a system that causes harm. It’s become commonplace that when I come home from work yet again because I put patient care before my personal time, I breakdown in tears from stress and the knowledge that I came into mental health nursing to help and it never feels like I’m doing that any more.

I’ve watched so many of my coworkers throw in the towel and leave. I don’t judge them, there is only so much a person can take before they have to leave for their own mental health. I watch those of us who stayed have their burnout get worse and losing the passion that brought them there fade away. I really don’t know how much longer we can take it, and I’m genuinely scared that there won’t be any mental health nurses left in hospitals by the end of this.

Our patients deserve so much better. The people of NSW deserve so much better.