5.1 Introduction
Learning Objectives
- Promote healthy coping strategies
- Differentiate between adaptive and maladaptive behaviors
- Identify defense mechanisms
- Identify legal and ethical obligations related to notification and documentation
- Describe mental health and mental illness
- Outline cultural considerations related to caring for clients with mental illness
- Describe trauma-informed care
- Identify signs and symptoms of acute and chronic stress
- Teach stress management techniques
- Recognize a client in crisis and describe crisis intervention
Mental health is an important part of overall health and includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act and helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices. Mental well-being is a state in which individuals realize their own abilities, cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively, and contribute to their community. Clients’ mental health states fit somewhere on the continuum ranging from mental well-being to mental illness.
This chapter will provide an overview of mental health, mental illness, stress response, stress management, and coping strategies. As with all areas of nursing, when caring for a person on the mental health-illness continuum, it is important to focus on client-centered care and evaluate the effectiveness of care in terms of the highest level of functioning that person is able to achieve.