The Real Issue in Nursing Stress and Mental Illness A Short Book Every Nurse Should Read

By Patrice M Foster

This book will help you deal with nursing-related issues, e.g., stress, anxiety, and depression, preventing you from getting lost/drained as you care for each patient!

Stress and other mental health issues are inevitable in the medical profession because we see pain and suffering all over us and at times, it is almost certain that this pain and suffering will get to us.

And when you couple that with tough working conditions like those experienced in 2020 when COVID-19 broke (where you have to go to work while risking getting infected), there is no denying that even the toughet of us is likely to experience challenges from time to time. I mean; we are all humans working with humans and no matter how much we know that we should not get attached to patients – we all know that there will be one or a few that we will feel some type of way about.

How then do you deal with the mental health issues that may crop up?

How do protect yourself from getting too attached too often to the point of breaking down?

How do you help a friend?

These and other related questions have been covered adequately inside this book.

I hope you will love it as it opens your eyes to a wide array of issues like how to notice when things are not well with your mental state, how to overcome these issues and ways to protect yourself to reduce the severity of anything that might crop up!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrice M Foster
• Release date: Dec 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223619956

Patrice M Foster

About The Author Patrice M Foster is a Registered Nurse in Childhood and Adolescence Psychiatry, with more than 30 plus years of clinical experience. She blogs and writes about issues that affect kids' mental health

Book preview

Introduction

Nursing - no matter how rewarding it may seem - is a challenging profession for many reasons. It comes with tons of workplace-related issues, not to mention stress, anxiety, depression, and over time, even physical health problems. All these issues directly result from the unhealthy culture nurses are surrounded by on a day-to-day basis throughout their entire career. This book starts by revealing the ugly truth about the challenges nurses face while trying their best to save lives. Because of these challenges, they eventually face health issues - starting from the decline of their mental health.

It's important to note that nurses experience several different types of stress during their job and even after. While work-related stress is often blamed for mental health issues in nursing, social stress can also be a contributing factor. Whether it comes from friends and family, colleagues, supervisors, or the patients themselves, negative influences in social interactions can have dire consequences on a nurse's mental health.

Nursing requires continuous learning and developing skills in care, adaptation, and much more. No patient has the same combination of medical history and cultural background. This means nurses must adapt their approach to providing the best possible care for each patient's needs. However, doing this when dealing with stress, anxiety, burnout, or any other health issue, becomes nearly impossible.

Just like in the case of every other medical profession, the stakes in nursing are incredibly high. Not only do patients depend on their nurses to provide adequate care, but nurses also depend on everyone around them. If you, as a nurse, are dealing with your own health issues, you can't be expected to provide adequate care for others - although this is often the case during those grueling hours. This is why understanding why these issues occur will help you avoid them so that you can provide the best care for your patients. By learning what challenges you're expected to face early on, you can develop successful coping techniques that'll guide you throughout the rest of your career.

And just like it happens in any other profession, you may occasionally even be blamed for your actions - no matter how well-intentioned they were at the time. After all, healthcare is not an exact science, and sometimes it's impossible to gauge the optimal approach. Lawsuits issued by upset patients and relatives are one of the most significant work-related problems nurses can face. It's equally important to learn how to protect yourself against them just as it is to avoid them as much as possible. If you are ready to learn about the issues nurses face, all you need to do is read on.

Chapter 1: The Ugly Truth

Nursing can be an incredibly rewarding career path, but it comes with several challenges. From demanding schedules to hard-to-handle patients, nurses experience numerous issues on a day-to-day basis. This chapter discusses what nursing workload entails, what nurses are expected to handle, and a broad range of challenging situations they often encounter in and out of the workplace. Learning about these situations can help you prepare for them. This way, you'll know how to manage them if you ever need to. Not only that but seeing these challenges will help you understand the amount of stress the nursing field puts on its workers and how this leads to the decline of their mental health.

The Magnitude of the Nursing Workload

To start off, many people aren't even aware of what nurses do. The main reason for the misconceptions about a nurse's job is that nursing is very hard to define as a concrete set of duties. In fact, the workload can be defined very differently, even by nurses themselves, depending on which side of the health sector they happen to be working in. Generally, the workload for nurses is defined as the amount of time their expertise is needed to meet the patient's needs. It may also refer to the need for care itself, which entails everything from working directly and indirectly with patients to professional development. This means that the work doesn't stop with nursing activities, especially if you want to grow professionally and expand your skill set.

While there is no clear answer to the question of what nurses do, there are some general responsibilities related to this field:

Conducting Physical Exams: In most cases, the first person evaluating a patient's state will be a nurse. They relay their findings to the doctor, who then takes over and investigates the issue.

Taking Health Care History: One of the most important duties of a nurse is to take the detailed medical history of a patient. This often includes family history as well, and combined with specific diagnostic methods, it helps doctors develop the appropriate diagnosis.

Monitoring Vital Signs: Nurses note down the patient's vital signs at the initial appointment, and if needed, they keep monitoring them until the patient leaves their care.

Testing: Along with other