Psychiatry Ethical Issues

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Pages: 5

It is well known that individuals who brave the profession of nursing will without a doubt face many hardships, trying times, extensive work hours, as well as difficult decisions to make. However, many people do not know that along with all of the other trials nurses may face on a daily basis, nurses may encounter many moral or ethical dilemmas in the work place. This is even more prominent amongst nurses who dare to venture into the specialty of psychiatric mental health nursing.
A psychiatric mental health nurses duties include typical nursing duties you would see in any other medical facility. These include administering medication and treatments, checking vital signs, assisting patients with daily activities, monitoring and assisting
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It is important for any nurse entering this field to understand that it is a high stress environment. In urgent situations, nurses must be able have quick thinking and sometimes make decisions without aid of a physician (Kontio, 2010). Having this responsibility of a high stress environment often results in depression as well as burnout for some nurses (Eren, 2014). According to Eren, psychiatry has always been the most questionable field in medicine from the start. One of the most conflicting issues nurses face in this field is that of patient autonomy, that is the patient doing things for themselves and on their own free will using their own course of action (Latvala, 1998). A violation of this could be anything from a family member checking in an unwilling patient into a hospital or facility, to having to force medications or treatment on an unwilling patient, or even physically restraining or sedating patients who pose danger to themselves or others. Although all of these instances are technically legal, it is still a dilemma amongst psychiatric …show more content…
the nurses and physicians) (Kontio, 2010). For example, seclusion or restraint is only imposed on the patient as a means of last resort when the therapeutic environment is disrupted due to aggressive behavior and a nurse feels he/she or other patients may be in danger. However, ethically, it can be contradicting because in restraining or secluding the patient emotional damage, and possible physical harm that can occur, as well as the patient/caregiver trust becoming broken. In response to the study, nurses and physicians began working on implementing alternative methods to seclusion and restraint after feelings of immense guilt as well as feeling as though they had failed the patients (Kontio,