As You Enter Psychiatric Nursing

Challenges in mental health nursing: current opinion

“…5 Mental health nursing was one of the last areas of specialization to come to the profession of nursing and one of the last experiences required in the training of nurses. 6 In 1882, McLean Hospital in Massachusetts implemented the first nursing program that trained its students how to work with and care for those with a mental illness. 7 Years later, in 1913, Johns Hopkins offered a course on psychiatric nursing to its students, making the course, which is said to have served as a prototype for other nursing programs, part of its curriculum.…”

“…Historically those even suspected of having a mental illness were shunned, feared, ridiculed, locked up, and, at times, even burned to death. 6 While treatment has improved and patients are no longer subjected to strait jackets, lobotomies, insulin therapy, hydrotherapy, and unnecessary restraints and isolation, applied mostly to settle the "wild beast", the public continues to fear this population. It is common knowledge that various forms of "treatment" years ago, such as locking people away in asylums and providing them with lobotomies, were, in part, motivated by the desire to keep the public safely separated from the mentally insane and render them harmless for the good of the general public.…”