First thoughts

The Locked Ward: The Memoir Of A Psychiatric Orderly

WHEN asked to leave his job caring for elderly dementia sufferers to work in a hospital psychiatric unit, Scottish nurse Dennis O’Donnell was unsure because he “wasn’t a fighter”.

Reassured that the patients needed people who could listen, he moved to Ward 25 — the Locked Ward — and spent seven years looking after people with all sorts of mental illnesses.