What is Mental Health Nursing?
Your Mental Health Nurse (MHN) is a health professional who provides integrated psychiatric and physical care focused on health and wellbeing. They have knowledge of the way your brain and body interact and utilize applied research in order to improve your social, emotional and physical wellbeing. Your MHN will form a working partnership with you, which will greatly improve your health outcomes! The four main actions your mental health nurse will assist with are:
Psychotherapy
Improving mental health can be intense — like a roller coaster ride, movement towards recovery can bring with it lots of highs and lows. Despite sounding a bit mysterious, psychotherapy is simply a process of individual assistance including things like coaching, giving feedback and learning new thinking and coping skills.
Physical Health
Your behavior related to physical health, wellness and vitality is one of the most important foundations of mental health. It’s often difficult to feel good about life when we feel physically weak, tired, or ill. Physical health involves assessing and improving things like how you sleep, what your diet is like and how much exercise you are doing. It may also include management of other medical conditions - this will be done in collaboration with your doctor.
Medication Management
Most of us routinely take medication for physical illnesses. If we have a headache, cough or cold we use panadol, throat lozenges or nasal spray etc. The good news is there are a whole variety of medications which can play a valuable role in helping us recover from mental health and substance use problems. Mental health nurses take a “Go Slow and Stay Low” approach with medication. Generally its best to see whether we can help you move forward without medication however if it is needed your mental health nurse will help you manage it in collaboration with your doctor.
Social supports, Advocacy & referral.
One of the founders of psychiatry Sigmund Freud stated that the key to mental health is to have “Somewhere to live, Someone to love and Something to do.” By saying this he was highlighting the great benefit of having a safe place to live, a group of friends and family we feel comfortable with and keeping yourselves busy through study or work. Your mental health nurse can help by advocating, and referring you to any social welfare or employment agencies that you believe might help you in these areas.