What Challenges Do Mental Health Nurses Face?
The brain is a complicated organ…
One of the toughest jobs for a nurse is working in mental health. This is largely because doctors and scientists still don't know a great deal about the brain and so treating patients is still not nearly as straight forward as say, treating someone with a broken leg or a bad kidney. <br/><br/> Faulty mental health can be something inherited, something corrupted during pregnancy or something suffered due to an accident. Plus the ailment is not always something fixed either, as the brain adapts to an altered state or gets stuck in self-destructive loop. <br/><br/> So what do nurses have to deal with? <br/><br/> Violence <br/><br/> One of the most widely publicised elements of a psychiatric nurse's job is the violence that they can face. Patients with certain kinds of mental disorder struggle with boundaries, communication and other things which mean they can lash out when they are frustrated. This is a difficult part of a mental health nurses role but part of the training involves learning how to deal with these situations with restraint techniques that don't harm the patient and techniques for entirely avoiding this kind of situation. <br/><br/> Distress <br/><br/> One thing mental health nurses have to face a lot is the distress felt by some patients. This can involve things ranging from them talking about negative things all the way up to attempted suicides. This can in turn be very distressing the nurse involved in these situations and can make the job quite stressful. Again training is largely geared towards preparing for situations such as this and counselling is always available should a nurse find a particular situation really hard. <br/><br/> Often nurses are encouraged to keep a good sense of humour about things on a psychiatric ward as not many of the patients in there have particularly positive stories. Being able to stay positive in the face of tough situations is important for this kind of nursing. <br/><br/> Beaurocracy <br/><br/> Mental health services are a notoriously difficult sector because there is always a battle over the choice between whether a patient should be treated with medication or with more psychological techniques. Beaurocracy can often dictate one course of action is taken over another that may contradict what a nurse actually feels to be the correct one. This can cause animosity between a nurse and her employer that may never go away. But then this is just another challenge of mental health nursing jobs and a range of other social care jobs. <br/><br/> Could you work in this extremely challenging area of nursing? <br/><br/> <br/><br/>
About the Author
Sam Qam is a psychiatric nurse. He spent years looking for mental health nursing jobs after doing several social care jobs in London.
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