Dive Brief:
- In spite of the fact that a majority of patients with mental illness suffer from low-level, chronic anxiety and depression, much of the current nursing education on mental illness focuses on acute, problematic psychiatric patients.
- Nurses and other providers regularly come into contact with people with mental illness not receiving treatment (in the ICU, ER and operating rooms), so it is important they are able to identify when a patient may need care.
- Training nurses to effectively treat patients with mental illness includes: providing training to all nurses regarding mental health issues, informing them that the problem is varied and can be encountered in various parts of a hospital, letting students know the patients deserve compassion and respect and familiarizing them with local mental health professionals.
Dive Insight:
Because nearly one-quarter of Americans deal with some sort of mental health condition, nurses are going to encounter people dealing with this in almost any area of a hospital or physician practice. If they are afraid of the patients, the level of care provided will be affected. This only adds to an existing negative trend: Patients with a comorbid mental illness already have worse health outcomes that people without one.
An older study, from 2000 in Nursing Standard, took a small cohort of nurses and asked them their thoughts about patients with both diabetes and a psychiatric disorder. Of the 64 nurses that took part, many feared both unexpected unpredictable behavior from the patients and the patients themselves. As with the community at large, there remains a stigma among people with mental health conditions.
One of the best ways to remove stigma of something like mental illness is exposure. If nurses understand the complexities of these patients, it will reduce fear. As mentioned in the article, if students are shown "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," they will have a very different idea of mental illness than if they are trained in a pediatric clinic or a rehabilitation program.
Want to read more? You may want to look at this infographic on the scope of mental illness in the U.S.