With Severe Mental Illness, A Vicious Circle of Stigma and Lack of Support

Although psychiatric facilities no longer treat patients the way movies like The Snake Pit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest depicted, society’s treatment of people with mental illness is still lacking.

As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I provide care for patients coping with the challenges of mental illness. Symptoms are often painful, life altering, and frightening. Sadly, patients experience additional suffering from the guilt, shame, and social isolation that comes with having a psychiatric disorder. That’s because mental illness continues to carry a stigma that inhibits people from seeking help and limits the amount of services available for those who do seek it.

Had they received the support they needed….

In this month’s Viewpoint in AJN, Juliet Hegdal, a family nurse practitioner, discusses the impact severe mental illness has on patients and their family members. The author shares what it was like being raised by a mother with schizophrenia and the lack of resources available to her and her family. She posits that her mother and society would have been better off had she received the support she needed. […]

2021-02-23T13:48:16-05:00February 23rd, 2021|mental illness|0 Comments
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A COVID-Era Telehealth Appointment Drives Home the Fragility and Strength of the Therapeutic Relationship

The Reflections essay in this month’s AJN is by LaRae Huyck, a psychiatric mental health NP. In this one-page story with a dramatic COVID-era twist, she explores her years accompanying a young counseling patient from suicidal depression during adolescence to joyful engagement with life as she heads out into the world on her own. Writes Huyck:

The time I spent with her seems so short, but in actuality it made up nearly a fourth of her life. We had traveled though the awkward adolescent years, the landmine of her parents’ divorce, the loss of a beloved grandmother, and a failed relationship that ended her dreams of a prom date.”

The healing power of a therapeutic relationship.

“The Importance of Time” adroitly summarizes this journey, revealing the author’s compassion for this young woman and her hopes for her as well. It’s a story of healing and growth that reveals the good that therapeutic relationships coupled with medication can do for some patients. […]

2021-01-11T13:47:05-05:00January 11th, 2021|mental illness, narratives, Nursing, Patients|0 Comments
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Addressing Clinician Mental Health and Suicide Risk During the Pandemic

Pandemics are known to cause panic disorder, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and posttraumatic stress. Depression can lead to suicide if not treated, yet is a treatable disease. We have seen nurses die by suicide during this pandemic in Italy.

Past experience suggests that health care workers exposed to the stress of the pandemic will need help long after the pandemic is under control.

I am serving as co-chair of the Strength Through Resilience task force of the American Nurses Association, whose focus was originally to collate resources to reduce suicide among nurses. We quickly shifted gears when the pandemic hit to collate resources to optimize resiliency and mental health among nurses in relation to the projected impact of the pandemic. Curiously, these resources are virtually identical. The ANA has posted initial resources as part of their Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation campaign and is and building more resources as quickly as possible.

Nurses already at higher suicide risk.

The added stress of the pandemic is particularly problematic because of evidence that emerged before the pandemic that nurses were at higher risk of suicide than the general public. If leaders at health care organizations have not already started proactively screening […]

2020-05-12T16:27:31-04:00May 12th, 2020|COVID-19, mental illness, Nursing, Public health|0 Comments
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Serious Mental Health Issues: No Room for System Errors

I knew that my patients were once without mental illness, just like my little sister Doris had been before her diagnosis 10 years before, and I always tried to picture them like that, each their own best version of themselves.

A sister’s preventable death.

In this month’s Reflections column, “No Room for Error: Reflections on My Sister,” family nurse practitioner Kelly Vaez shares the story of the unexpected death of her sister, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia ten years earlier. It’s particularly heart-wrenching to be able to see clearly, in retrospect, the ways in which our rushed, fragmented, and mental-health-unfriendly health care system contributed to what was probably an easily preventable death.

A dentist prescribed an unusually long course of antibiotics after a routine tooth extraction. The primary care team seemed unaware of the antibiotic therapy. No one made the connection between Doris’ diarrhea and this antibiotic, a frequent cause of C.diff infection.

And finally, loperamide—a drug that should never, ever be given for diarrhea that might be caused by C. diff—was prescribed with what seems to have been minimal assessment for the cause of the diarrhea. Was this last because the patient was a young adult with schizophrenia, and […]

2020-02-10T10:13:29-05:00February 10th, 2020|mental illness, Nursing|1 Comment
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Mental Health Nursing: Transcending the Limitations of Words

When I met Dorothy, she was always counting. Her chapped lips moved nonstop as she chanted random numbers. She’d increase the speed, as if that would help her to reach the end quickly—but since the numbers didn’t appear to be in any sensible order, this loomed before her like an impossible task…

The challenge of mental health nursing.

Illustration by Pat Kinsella. All rights reserved.

This month’s Reflections column, “Dimensions of Dorothy,” begins with this harrowing look at a woman in the grip of a mental health crisis. Author Maureen Bonatch goes on to poignantly describe how this illness can “steal someone’s identity and overwhelm their self-control.”

As a new nurse at the state psychiatric hospital, Bonatch definitely had a “new normal” to adjust to at work. As she observed the manifestations of severe mental illness, she also developed insight into why some had so few visitors: “It had to be difficult,” she writes, “to helplessly observe as an illness crept in to hold the person you knew and loved hostage.”

An inadequately valued area of […]

2018-11-20T10:07:55-05:00November 20th, 2018|mental illness, narratives, Nursing|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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