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 […]

2018-11-20T10:07:55-05:00November 20th, 2018|mental illness, narratives, Nursing|0 Comments
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A Dream of Horses: An Aging Veteran’s Healing Encounter

“Let’s go for a ride,” I said to Joe as he lay expressionless on his bed, covered in blankets and staring at the ceiling. The room was stuffy with hot, stale air. No bigger than a walk-in closet, the space held the lifetime possessions, many of them scattered on the bed, floor, and windowsill, of a 75-year-old veteran residing in an assisted living facility. Joe appeared frail and bored in the silence of the room.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin for AJN.

That’s the start of the Reflections column, “A Dream of Horses,” in the January issue of AJN. Written by a nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the short, moving essay describes a series of healing encounters between a frail older man, who seems to have given up on life, and the horses at a therapeutic equestrian barn.

The here and now.

The story told here reminds us how much we humans can cocoon ourselves against the more elemental forces of the natural world, and how healing it can be to encounter a magnificent animal that asks only that we be present in the here and now. The senses awaken. We look beyond our own habitual ways of […]

2018-01-16T10:00:35-05:00January 16th, 2018|Nursing, nursing stories, Patients|0 Comments
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Through Song, a Nurse’s Renewed Connection to An Ailing Mother

Illustration by Barbara Hranilovich for AJN.

Millions of Americans are now acting in some capacity as caregivers for an ailing parent. This month’s Reflections column is by a nurse who describes a moment in time as she helps to care for her home-bound and dying mother. Her mother remains, on occasion, as judgmental and offputting as the mother of her childhood.

But in such cases, there’s little to gain by dwelling on old disappointments and hurts—and in this instance, there are good memories as well.

The common language of song.

These good memories are primarily associated with her mother’s love of and talent for singing. “Moon River and Mom” describes this nurse’s experience of tending her mother’s leg wound as the Meals on Wheels man visits, and what happens afterward when the author prompts her mother to sing. […]

2017-11-03T07:50:46-04:00November 3rd, 2017|family experience, Nursing, nursing stories|0 Comments
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A Place for Faith: Despite Chronic Illness, a Return to Bedside Nursing

flickr creative commons/by krassy can do it

Relearning the Details of Clinical Nursing

After being away from bedside nursing for over 11 years, I recently returned to this role on the same medical-surgical floor I’d worked on 11 years earlier. The impetus behind such a drastic transition was, in part, my return to nursing education as a clinical nursing instructor. As an educator, I felt the need to update my own clinical skills as I instructed young nurses eager to enter my profession.

The other reason for returning to clinical nursing had to do with a spiritual pull I felt in my heart, a hope that I’d be able to to show patients the compassion, empathy, and patience they all deserved. I’d come to realize that I’d sometimes lacked these qualities when I was a younger bedside nurse. Now I felt that God was giving me a kind of ‘do-over’—and I had to at least try to live up to this expectation.

Within the first week of orientation, I quickly realized how different things had become in the nursing world. The last time I’d worked as a clinical nurse on this very unit in 2005, the hospital was still using paper documentation, private community physicians still rounded on their patients, and there were no ‘computers […]

2017-03-08T11:17:02-05:00March 6th, 2017|career, Nursing, patient experience|5 Comments
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A Thanksgiving Note on Thankfulness from AJN’s Editor-in-Chief

cranberriesI’m looking forward to Thanksgiving. After an emotional and sometimes divisive election year, I welcome the opportunity to turn my thoughts to something positive for a bit. Whatever our allegiances, we’ve come to a watershed moment in our country and we need to find ways to regroup as a nation, examine how we came to this place, and find ways to move forward in a way that benefits all of us. This may mean something different for each of us.

For now, it’s important to stop to think about the good things that are in our lives and not dwell solely on what distresses us.

Here are some reasons I have to be thankful:

I’m grateful for a year in which I have not lost a close friend or family member.

I’m grateful to be working with people I like who are committed to doing good work.

I’m grateful to all those folks who make life work for all of us—the mail deliverers, the sanitation workers, police and fire departments, the people in the grocery store—all who show up and do their jobs.

I’m grateful to all the nurses who show up every day, including Thanksgiving, and provide the care that every patient depends on.

And yes, I’m grateful to live in a great country that has faced many challenges, reconciled many differences, made so many great contributions to the world, and always eventually found a way to preserve our core freedoms while adapting to the one constant, […]

2016-11-23T11:57:14-05:00November 21st, 2016|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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