#AskOurNurses is an initiative where we invite nurses from various hospital departments to share more about the department, and what it is like to be a nurse in their respective departments.
We have Mr Jeremy Yao from Institute of Mental Health to share about Mental Health Nursing, and address some of the questions you have posted on our IG story. The following are the questions that our guest speaker have answered.
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Question: Describe mental health nursing in 1 word.
Mr Jeremy: Fun
Question: What are the qualities needed to be a psychiatric nurse?
Mr Jeremy: Patience and resilience
Question: How can fresh graduates adapt to a psychiatric environment?
Mr Jeremy: For me because I love psychiatric nursing from the start, my advice would be if you like psychiatric nursing, take the leap of faith and go for it and everything will be ok.
Question: How is mental health nursing different from general nursing?
Mr Jeremy: The profile of the patients are definitely very different. I would have to say we have to cater to a different set of care. Whereas the ones we have during our clinical training as a student, is more general and very different.
Question: What is the additional skill set needed to be a psychiatric nurse?
Mr Jeremy: I think the most important factor being a psychiatric nurse would be communication skills. We have to build a therapeutic relationship with the patients more than anything. This is not a medication treatment but more of how we build the relationship and help them in their healing process.
Question: What made you choose psychiatric nursing?
Mr Jeremy: I chose psychiatric nursing because it feels like a new challenge for me everyday. You wont know what is in store for you today until you step into the ward. You must always be ready for whatever that is coming your way.
Question: What is the most challenging task as a psychiatric nurse?
Mr Jeremy: For me in my role, many patients do share their life journey with me, and this can be heavy to bear. So if you are easily affected by it, it will affect you. So it is very important for you to be able to regulate your own emotions so that you will not be affected by it. If not otherwise, your passion will run out pretty fast.
Question: How do you maintain self-care and keep your mental health in check in the line of work that you do?
Mr Jeremy: For me, I do sports on my own time and I enjoy time with my family members. This are all the distress mode that I go for. So I do actually enjoy get together with my colleagues and friends so we can go out and chill in a cafe, talk to each other over a good meal. These are all good techniques that we can adopt to regulate our own emotions. We can then vent our frustrations and talk about it, and it does help a lot. And because all of us are in this line of work, we understand each other and can cheer each other up.
Question: How has mental health nursing changed your perspective towards mental health?
Mr Jeremy: For me, before I joined psychiatric nursing I had this mindset passed from the previous generation. You know how our mothers and grandparents like to say “you naughty, later the siao lang (crazy man) come and catch you” along that phrases. So when I first joined psychiatric nursing, I did have this kind of mindset. So you would definitely be very afraid of your surroundings. Once you join psychiatric nursing for long, you would then know that these are not what the patients want. Just that it is unfortunate that these patients have these conditions. And they start to experience the altered behaviour that we deemed as weird and scary, and once we understand that, we will see the other side of their behaviour. Then we will be more daring to engage the patients and that is how we can build the therapeutic relationship with the patients. I would tell you, the satisfaction feeling when you see patient from the initial phase from not being able to recognize you, cannot call you, and once you start treatment for them, and they can start to recognize and call out your name, and thanking you before the discharge, it is very heartwarming and really enjoy this psychiatric nursing.
Question: What are the different opportunities that a psychiatric nurse can branch into?
Mr Jeremy: Actually for psychiatric nurses, we have a few branches we can go into. Usually people would say that once we are in the psychiatric field, you would be pretty much narrowed down your career development. But actually there are many ways in psychiatric nursing to progress. We have the advanced practitioner nurse (APN) track, we have nurses doing community nursing, we have the mobile crisis team which responds to the emergency psychiatric cases in the community, we also have case management reviewed by the staff nurses in the ward. There are a lot more branches you can adopt based on your liking.
If you like clinical, you can go down the APN track. If you like administrative, you can go into the nurse clinician track, and if you like education, you can go into education side. And if you like being involved in the community, you can join our community psychiatric nurse to do house visits. So there are a lot of ways.
Question: What is the most memorable case you ever encountered?
Mr Jeremy: Every patient/case is unique and serves as a memory to me. They make me reflect on how I can be a better psychiatric nurse to the patients. Just to share one case, where I met one of my patients (a bipolar case). When he first came into IMH, he was disorientated, irrelevant. So my team and I started treating him and got him into a better shape and eventually discharged him. After some time, I met this same patient outside. So he came to me greeting me in a very cheerful manner, he can clearly remember my name and he was telling me how he was thankful to my team and I for taking care of him and how he is very different now and how he feels that he is ready to reintegrate into the community. That is something that is very heartwarming for us, for psychiatric nursing to see.
Question: Do you have any advice/tips for students who wish to join psychiatric nursing?
Mr Jeremy: You have to know what you want in your career. You have a lot of attachments throughout your years of studies, so you have to get exposed to all disciplines, be it emergency department, operating theatre. Definitely there would be one place that will catch your attention, and you would have this sudden sense of calling. So when you have this sense of calling, this tingling sensation, take a leap of faith. You are fresh graduate, still young, can really experience and explore before finding your true calling. If you like challenge and interesting cases where you would not be able to see in general hospital, then psychiatric nursing is definitely your cup of tea.
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