Psychiatric nursing: medical science or soda! science?

摘要

A few weeks ago my wife attended a nurse practitioner conference in Ohio. People at the table introduced themselves, each job description being greeted by murmurs of approval, until my wife said that she was a psychiatric nurse practitioner working in a mental health clinic. The responses then were along the lines of'bless you for doing it as it has to be done, but that's one nursing job that I just couldn't do'.The other nurses did not mean to be rude or dismissive, but to me such comments reflect the reality that, underneath it all, they didn't view psychiatric nursing as a legitimate branch of nursing. Every psychiatric nurse has had similar reactions from nurses in emergency rooms, med-surg wards and elsewhere. Many general nurses are simply sceptical regarding the premise that psychiatry is a branch of medicine like any other and that psychiatric nurses are 'real' nurses just like any other. This scepticism also applies to physicians, as I've heard many psychiatrists talk of how they are still viewed with suspicion by their medical colleagues regarding where or whether psychiatry truly fits in the spectrum of medical illnesses. Now, the usual thing to say is that education about mental illness is the key to turning around this attitude—but over the past 40 years there's been a whole lot of education about mental illness, and as far as I can see it has had remarkably little effect on changing attitudes on this issue. Which then makes me wonder if we in psychiatry and psychiatric nursing have done anything ourselves to perpetuate this scepticism, and if I look at how our profession has presented itself to our colleagues and the general public, the answer to that is, unfortunately:'Yes, we have !'