ABSTRACT
The first and most important principle relates to the centrality of the body in nursing consciousness, a lesson which was driven home to Wendy by his patient Wendy. Nurses are trained in verbal techniques of therapeutic communication - repeating, summarizing, paraphrasing, validating, and so on. Displays of compassion and attentive care are an important and valuable part of their work, but they are not the same, logically and conceptually, as the more intellectually rigorous task of attuning to what might be specific, distinctive, and unique in a patient's subjective categories of thought and experience. At the advanced level, psychiatric nursing increasingly consists of practices divorced from body experience: the authors dispense prescriptions for psychotropic medications to be administered by others, they take seminars in leadership and management and pile certifications alongside their titles. Administrative and clinical leadership responded quickly to the episode, with sensitivity and compassion, offering counseling and paid days off to anyone who had participated in the rescue.
