Nursing care can figuratively be described as a gift that is given by the nurse in the nurse-patient relationship where attitudes play an important role for the gift's appearance. Sometimes patients are unwilling to or incapable of accepting the gift and this can lead to situations in which nurses are not able to handle their situation in a professional manner. This research survey aimed to investigate nurses' attitudes and find a structure in nurses' attitudes towards their patients. Six psychiatric group dwellings and six acute psychiatric hospital wards participated in the study. In all, 2700 assessments of 163 patients were sent out to 160 respondents and 2436 answers were returned. The semantic differential technique was used. The scale has 57 bipolar pairs of adjective, which estimate an unknown number of dimensions of nurses' attitudes towards an identified patient. The respondents' answers were analysed through factor analysis rotated using the Varimax method and etropy-based measures of association combined with structural plots were also used. Both the factor analysis and the entropy revealed three factors, which were interpreted as being of evaluative type. Factor 1 was interpreted as describing nurses' answers mainly as a combination of an ethical and aesthetic evaluation of the patients. Factor 2 was interpreted as being of an empathetic type and factor 3 as nurses' experiences of the patients' cognitive capacity. The study indicates that the dominant aspect of nurses' attitudes in a psychiatric context is the ethical/aesthetic dimension, which is an important finding for the understanding of nurses' attitudes and actions towards their patients.

The aim of this study was to describe patterns of personality disorders (PDs) in women with chronic eating disorders (EDs). An index group of nineteen women who have had EDs for an average of 8.5 years was compared with a control group of same-aged women from the general population. At the time of the study the index group received treatment at a tertiary treatment center in Stockholm. The PDs were assessed using the DSM-IV part of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 Personality Questionnaire (DIP-Q). In the index group, eighteen of nineteen fulfilled the criteria for one or more PD. The number of PD diagnoses for each women ranged from zero (n = 1) to eight (n = 2) with a median of three. Among the controls, only one woman fulfilled the criteria for one or more PD. The most prevalent disorders in the index group were Borderline, Avoidant, and Obsessive-Compulsive. The index group had significantly higher DIP-Q dimensional scores than the controls in the Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Borderline, Histrionic, Avoidant, and Dependent scales. Although the assessment of PD symptoms was limited to self-reports, the high prevalence of PD diagnoses and PD symptoms most probably reflects the severe psychiatric impairments in patients suffering from chronic ED.

People suffering from depressive disorder are affected by one of the western world’s largest medical groups of disorders in both psychiatric and general medicine. Drug treatment is usually the first‐line intervention and has been shown to be an effective treatment. Other therapies, including nursing interventions that could be implemented in care, are infrequently used. It is therefore important to understand whether nurses’ perceptions of depressed people could be explained from the medical model by defining the nurses’ view of psychiatric inpatients. Therefore, the aim of this study was, with the clinical picture as the starting point, to investigate the nurses’ view of hospitalized patients with a diagnosis of depression. In this prospective study, 155 nurses’ opinion of depression among depressive inpatients was assessed using a questionnaire based on the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale. To elucidate the relationship between the variables in the questionnaire, factor analysis rotated by the Varimax method with Kaiser’s normalization was used. The factor analysis identified five factors. The number of variables was reduced from 61 to 34. Based on the factor interpretation, an initial factor structure for the depressive inpatient was defined. The identified factors were interpreted and labelled to create the nurses’ fused ‘picture’ or meaning of the depressed inpatient as an individual who experienced feelings of annihilation, alienation, fatigue, emptiness and affliction, an individual who is disconnected from the whole of temporality.

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the urinary excretion of low molecular weight peptides is increased in women with a history of anorexia nervosa/self starvation. The study group consisted of 12 women aged 20-38 years who were treated in a specialised day care unit for eating disorders in Stockholm between January and December 1998; the controls were eight women with primary bulimia treated in the same unit (A) and ten healthy women without any eating disorder (B). The chromatographically measured urinary peptide levels in the study group were significantly higher than those in control group A (and B when one highly influential individual with very low peptide excretion in the study group was excluded from the analyses). These findings offer some support to the speculative hypothesis that eating disorder symptoms may be linked to increased levels of neuroactive peptides, although it is necessary to define the peptides further before any definite conclusion can be drawn. Furthermore, the study group was characterised by many interpersonal differences in eating behaviour that could explain the increased urinary peptide levels.