Psychological dysfunction in psychiatric and general nurse trainees

Higher levels of psychiatric symptomatology reported by health professionals working in medical settings in Greece

BACKGROUND

Psychological distress in healthcare workers may vary across different specialties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in the rate of anxiety and depression between medical and mental healthcare workers.

METHODS

The sample was randomly selected and consisted of 229 workers from the medical health sector and 212 from the mental health sector, aged 39.8 ± 7.9 years old. Health workers from University and General Hospitals from all over Greece participated in the study. The Greek version of the Symptoms Rating Scale For Depression and Anxiety (SRSDA) was used. Statistics were processed with SPSS v. 17.0.

RESULTS

The medical health professionals showed statistically significantly higher scores in all the subscales in comparison with the mental health sector workers, independently of years serving in the department. The rates of a possible psychiatric disorder (score over cutoff points) were significantly elevated on the Beck-21, melancholy and asthenia subscales.

CONCLUSIONS

Medical healthcare workers appear to suffer from psychological distress more than their colleagues in the mental sector.

Mental health nursing students differ from other nursing students: Some observations from a study on stress and coping

The study reported here is taken from a wider investigation into stress among preregistration nursing students, undertaken in the nursing department of a large university in northern England. British nursing is divided into four specialties or 'branches': adult, mental health, children's, and learning disability nursing, and the aim of the study was to explore interbranch differences among the students in terms of the sources of stress they identify, the levels of stress they experience, and the ways in which they cope. A cross-sectional survey of all nursing students on the department's roll (n = 1362), using a range of self-report measures bound together in a 'questionnaire pack', was undertaken. The questionnaire pack contained formal measures of sources of stress (Student Nurse Stress Index), stress (specifically, psychological distress) (General Health Questionnaire) and coping (Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations), as well as a set of questions that enabled data on a range of pertinent variables, including the nursing branch being pursued, to be collected. The findings revealed that mental health nurses were notably different from the other three branches in terms of the quantity and characteristics of the sources of stress they faced, the levels of stress they experienced, and the ways in which they coped. These differences were largely advantageous to the students' well-being and speculations are made as to whether the concept of 'hardiness'- especially its focus on a sense of being in control - plays a role in explaining the findings.

Strategies for reducing stress and burnout in nursing

Three models of stress-the stimulus model, the response model and the cognitive-phenomenological-transactional (CPT) model-have been described in detail elsewhere (Farrington, 1995), and the notion of accepting occupational stress as an industrial disease has been suggested (Nursing Times, 1995). This article focuses on the nursing experience of stress and describes strategies for reducing stress and burnout on a personal and organizational level. It concludes by presenting a small-scale research study which examined the nature and impact of events perceived by postregistration nurses to cause personal psychological distress. The findings of the research show that certain stimuli are consistently perceived as being psychologically traumatizing in the daily working life of the student nurse. Nursing clearly remains an emotionally demanding occupation and more work is needed to examine the way in which events and microstressors are cognitively processed by nurses.