Lived experiences of psychiatric patients with mood disorders who attended group therapy facilitated by professional psychiatric nurses

Background: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), up to 25% of people worldwide will develop mental health disorders during their lifetime. Patients admitted to acute inpatient units for mood disorders experience emotional distress. Group therapy has the potential to foster the therapeutic change through specific therapeutic mechanisms. Psychiatric nurses working in inpatient units are in a unique position to offer group therapy.Objectives: Explore and describe stabilised acute psychiatric patients with mood disorders’ lived experiences of group therapy facilitated by psychiatric nurses. Make specific recommendations for psychiatric nurses to facilitate constructive group therapy for stabilised acute psychiatric patients with mood disorders in an inpatient unit.Method: A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and contextual design was used in the study. A purposive sample of all patients with mood disorders older than 18 years admitted to inpatient units who participated in group therapy was made. Data were collected through conducting phenomenological interviews, observation and field notes. Interviews focussed on the following open question: ‘How did you experience group therapy facilitated by the psychiatric nurses?’ An independent coder analysed the data by using thematic coding. Measures to ensure trustworthiness were applied. The following four ethical principles were adhered to: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice.Results: Three themes emerged from this study. Theme 1 entailed the psychological experiences of patients attending group therapy. Theme 2 highlighted the interpersonal experiences of patients. Theme 3 evolved around patients’ experiences outside group therapy. Patients initially experienced attending group therapy as anxiety provoking. However, negative psychological experiences soon transformed into positive psychological experiences.Conclusion: The findings of this study were used to make specific recommendations to facilitate constructive group therapy for patients with mood disorders.

Leaders’ limitations and approaches to creating conditions for interaction and communication in parental groups: A qualitative study

The aim of this study was to describe and understand parental group (PG) leaders’ experiences of creating conditions for interaction and communication. The data consisted of 10 interviews with 14 leaders. The transcribed interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The results showed that the leaders’ ambition was to create a parent-centred learning environment by establishing conditions for interaction and communication between the parents in the PGs. However, the leaders’ experience was that their professional competencies were insufficient and that they lacked pedagogical tools to create constructive group discussions. Nevertheless, they found other ways to facilitate interactive processes. Based on their experience in the PG, the leaders constructed informal socio-emotional roles for themselves (e.g. caring role and personal role) and let their more formal task roles (e.g. professional role, group leader and consulting role) recede into the background, so as to remove the imbalance of power between the leaders and the parents. They believed this would make the parents feel more confident and make it easier for them to start communicating and interacting. This personal approach places them in a vulnerable position in the PG, in which it is easy for them to feel offended by parents’ criticism, questioning or silence.

Testing an alternative relationship between individual and contextual predictors of creative performance

Existing studies have been focused mainly on the effects of individual and contextual factors on creativity, leaving unaddressed the intermediate processes through which these predictors affect creativity. Based on previous theoretical arguments, we proposed that individuals' cognitive and affective states with regard to creativity comprise the direct antecedents of creative performance. Specifically, we hypothesized that creativity efficacy and positive attitude toward creativity mediate the effects on creative performance of individual creative ability, supportive leadership, and constructive group norms. The empirical results based on multisource, longitudinal panel data clearly indicate that these cognitive and affective process variables mediate the effects of both individual and contextual variables on creative performance. These findings reveal potential psychological processes that should be targeted when educators and managers design interventions to increase creative performance of individuals.