Don't Drink The Nursing Kool Aid

For those of you too young to remember, "Drinking the Kool Aid" is an expression dating back from the late 1970s when followers of Reverend Jim Jones blindly and naively drank Kool Aid laced with cyanide, a collective action that resulted in many deaths and great trauma.So, although nurses' experience in no way compares to what happened in Jonestown in 1978, the notion of drinking poison from a particular collective well certainly sounds familiar to me. Having said that, what Kool Aid do nurses drink? Nurses are a hearty and thoughtful bunch, and like any group of human beings, we can at times fall under the spell of the latest news or collective thinking, no matter how erroneous or callous it may be.The Poison of Bullying For instance, some nurses buy into the notion that bullying and "lateral violence" are the norm within our profession and there's simply nothing that can be done about it. There are nurses who witness bullying or intimidation and speak out against it, and then there are those who, perhaps out of fear of reprisal, stand idly by as their fellow nurses are intimidated and harassed.When we accept something like bullying as the norm, aren't we, in essence, drinking the Kool Aid that has poisoned us against righteous action? Isn't our silence then complicity? We may say to ourselves, "Oh, it's always been like that and I can't change it", but what kind of cowardice is that?  Bullying is an excellent example of how "group think"---a term often associated with...
Source: Digital Doorway - Category: Nurses Tags: nurse nurse identity nurses nursing nursing identity Source Type: blogs