Nursing is a very demanding career, and a post in a mental health facility is perhaps the most challenging of all. Your training will have prepared you for the medical aspects of nursing, but how do you care for mental health patients with compassion and professionalism?
When supporting mental health patients, remember these 5 essential tips for compassionate nursing care.
Never Stop Learning
Developing an attitude of continuous learning improves your chances of career advancement and opens doors to other specializations. It also keeps you updated with the latest medical and nursing care advances.
Are you considering a qualification that centers around mental health? You may be interested in a Master of Science in Nursing Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) program. And you don’t have to stop your current nursing work to achieve it.
The program offered by Yale University Nursing, for example, can be done mostly online (in the US and certain states, only). But you can keep learning in other ways, too, like reading medical journals and research papers. More is being discovered about mental health, every day, so never stop learning, and offer mental health patients the most compassionate care possible.
Be Aware of Your Tone
There are different types of therapy for mental health patients, including psychiatry, psychology, counseling, and certain branches of social work. The one thing these professionals have in common is watching their tone when speaking to mental health patients.
No matter how carefully you choose your words (we’ll get to that in a moment), it could be undone with the wrong tone.
Compassionate nursing care demands awareness of how emotional states could affect the patients around you. There will be times when you are tired, frustrated, and even downright annoyed. This is natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. However, this can easily creep into the tone of your voice.
Some mental health patients are acutely aware of their surroundings and especially sensitive to these cues. They could easily misinterpret them incorrectly, to their detriment. Always strive to keep your tone warm and soft and avoid sudden exaggerated movements or outbursts whenever possible.
Choose Your Words Carefully
Avoid language that alienates, prescribes blame, demoralizes, or shames patients. Mental health patients are particularly susceptible to self-blame, feelings of isolation, and despair. Choosing your words carefully is paramount in supporting mental health patients.
There are many ways in which you could, inadvertently, worsen their anxiety or negativity toward treatment, with a poor choice of words. Here are a few examples:
- Don’t refer to them as being “afflicted by mental disease” or “suffering from mental illness’. Rather use more powering terminology like “living with a mental health condition”.
- When they express their fear, no matter how irrational they may seem, avoid saying things like “Don’t be silly/ridiculous/stupid”. You could, instead, say something reassuring like: “You don’t have to worry about that”.
- If they have tried to commit suicide, they are a suicide survivor. The word survivor implies strength. Don’t refer to their “failed suicide attempts”.
These are just a few examples of how slightly different wording can have a completely different effect.
Divert from Obstacles to Opportunities
When engaged in conversation with mental health patients, divert the focus away from problems to opportunities. This can be especially helpful in cases of dual diagnosis, where patients admitted for drug or alcohol addiction are further diagnosed with an underlying mental health issue.
Often, it is this very mental health problem that has led to substance abuse, as a coping mechanism or a distraction. However, the patient now faces two roads to recovery – from their mental health condition (for example, depression) and their addiction.
Their insistence that drug addiction treatment “won’t work” or will interfere with their schedule is a common problem. Divert conversations from the obstacles – taking time off work or away from loved ones for treatment to the opportunities they offer – increased health and stronger relationships.
Consider Their Cultural Background
Should a mental health patient ever refuse to let you give them nursing care, don’t stress. Your competence is not necessarily in question. There may be cultural factors at play, and the compassionate response is to address their concerns.
Be sensitive to such cultural differences when engaging mental health patients. They are usually the reason they refuse treatment or are resistant to therapy. This can also cause mental health patients to refuse nursing care or therapy from very young staff, or practitioners of the opposite sex.
Some ethnic minority clients, despite similar rates of psychopathology, seek out mental health services less often than other population groups. This is often due to their culture’s attitudes to mental health. These cultural influences in mental health treatment cannot and should not be ignored.
You will be able to offer more compassionate nursing care to mental health patients when you consider their cultural background. Ask them what they would feel more comfortable with. Sometimes, it’s best to hand care over to a more experienced staff member, or someone from a similar cultural background.
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