This chapter is all about helping you to understand what mental health nursing is. To this end, we will consider what you must know and do when you first meet people with mental health problems. We will introduce a personal account from a mental health service user early in the chapter in order to help you begin to understand what working with people with mental health problems is like and what service users want from mental health nurses. In an effort to help you become familiar with what mental health nursing is, we will explore the following issues: what is a profession; what is nursing; what beliefs and values inform nursing; why is it important for mental health nurses to be self-aware; and what do mental health nurses need to know? In the final part of this chapter we explore the nature of boundaries in professional relationships and the implications of this for practice as a mental health nurse. Before you read any further we would encourage you to recognize that mental health service users are, quite rightly, the real experts in their care and needs. It is vitally important that you listen and really attend to what they are saying to you. We have asked a service user, Deborah Living, to represent for you some of the important issues that she would like mental health nurses to be aware of, and Deborah is going to tell you part of her own life story. I consider myself to be a survivor…not just a survivor of mental health difficulties but also a survivor of mental health services. I feel I am a survivor because I have reclaimed my life after more than ten years of mental health diagnoses and treatments: diagnoses from clinical depression to cyclothymia (described as a ‘milder’ form of manic depression); antidepressants and mood stabilisers from prozac to lithium; and interventions from counselling to psychiatry, through ECT to being an inpatient. It took me over a decade and a 12-month stay in a residential therapeutic community to stop the ‘revolving door’ approach within the mental health service, whereby I would gain short-term stability only to relapse yet again.
Training Mental Health Nurses to Assess the Physical Health Needs of Mental Health Service Users: A Pre- and Post-test Analysis
