Mental health nursing at a time of crisis.

: In Albert Camus' The Plague, the medical training of chief protagonist Dr Bernard Rieux fails to inoculate against his initial disbelief that an epidemic has arrived in the Algerian town of Oran. As Camus writes, 'Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky' (Camus, 1947).