V Glossary
Adaptive coping strategies: Healthy, effective responses to stressors that include problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. (Chapter 5.3)
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Stressful and potentially traumatic events experienced during childhood such as abuse, neglect, or growing up in a household with violence, mental illness, substance misuse, incarceration, or divorce. ACE can affect an individual’s mental health and are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood. (Chapter 5.2)
Behavioral restraints: Restraints used to manage violent or self-destructive behavior that poses an immediate danger to a client or others. (Chapter 5.2)
Behavioral self-regulation: The ability to act in one’s long-term best interest, consistent with one’s deepest values. It is what allows us to feel one way but act another. (Chapter 5.3)
Chemical restraint: A drug used to manage a client’s behavior, restrict the client’s freedom of movement, or impair the client’s ability to appropriately interact with their surroundings that is not standard treatment or dosage for the client’s condition.40 (Chapter 5.2)
Competency: A legal term related to the degree of cognitive ability an individual has to make decisions, carry out specific acts, or provide informed consent. (Chapter 5.2)
Coping: Cognitive and behavioral efforts made to master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal demands and conflicts. (Chapter 5.3)
Coping strategies: Actions or thought processes used to modify one’s emotional reactions to stressors that are perceived to be long-term or unchangeable. (Chapter 5.3)
Crisis: A person’s inability to cope or adapt to a stressor, in which their usual coping mechanisms fail. (Chapter 5.2)
Crisis intervention: Resources employed and interventions implemented to therapeutically assist an individual in crisis to remain safe, as well as ensure the safety of staff, other patients, and visitors. (Chapter 5.2)
Defense mechanisms: Reaction patterns that are used by individuals to protect themselves from anxiety that arises from stress and conflict.1 (Chapter 5.4)
Emergency admission status: An admission to a mental health facility or unit when an individual is deemed likely to harm themselves or others. (Chapter 5.2)
Emotional self-regulation: Effectively controlling one’s emotions. (Chapter 5.3)
Emotion-focused coping: Strategies used to manage one’s emotional response to stressors, such as participating in mindfulness, meditation, or yoga; using humor and jokes; seeking spiritual or religious pursuits; engaging in physical activity or breathing exercises; and seeking social support. (Chapter 5.3)
Environmental stressors: Aspects of a client’s surroundings that may increase mental or emotional strain, induce the stress response, and possibly impact their health care. (Chapter 5.4)
Ethical principles: Principles used to define right from wrong action. Although there are many ethical principles that guide nursing practice for all clients, foundational ethical principles include respect for autonomy (self-determination), beneficence (do good), nonmaleficence (do no harm), justice (fairness), fidelity (keep promises), and veracity (tell the truth). (Chapter 5.2)
Hallucinations: Sensing things with any of the five senses that don’t exist in reality. (Chapter 5.2)
Health: A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. (Chapter 5.2)
Involuntary admission: Admission to a mental health facility or unit for care that is necessary to prevent harm to the client or others even though the individual does not desire care. (Chapter 5.2)
Lack of insight: The inability to perceive changes in one’s own feelings, behavior, or personality. (Chapter 5.2)
Maladaptive coping: Ineffective responses to stressors, such as avoidance of the stressful condition, withdrawal from a stressful environment, disengagement from stressful relationships, aggression, or misuse of alcohol or other substances. (Chapter 5.3, Chapter 5.4)
Mental health conditions: Term that encompasses mental health disorders, psychosocial disabilities, and other mental states with significant distress, impaired functioning, or risk of self-harm. (Chapter 5.2)
Mental health continuum: Fluctuations over the course of an individual’s life span that can range from well-being (with occasional stress and mild distress) to emotional problems and/or mental illness with impaired functioning. (Chapter 5.2)
Mental illness: A health condition involving changes in emotion, thinking, behavior, or a combination of these, associated with emotional distress and problems functioning in social, work, or family activities. (Chapter 5.2)
Neurotransmitters: Chemicals in the brain that send messages throughout the nervous system. (Chapter 5.2)
Phobias: Abnormal fears. (Chapter 5.2)
Problem-focused coping: Effective responses to a stressor that include seeking treatment, such as counseling or cognitive behavioral therapy. (Chapter 5.3)
Resilience: An individual’s successful adaptation to difficult or challenging life experiences through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. (Chapter 5.2)
Restraints: Devices used in health care settings to prevent clients from causing harm to themselves or others when alternative interventions are not effective. (Chapter 5.2)
Seclusion: The confinement of a client in a locked room or an area from which they cannot exit on their own. (Chapter 5.2)
Self-harm: Refers to purposely injuring one’s body, such as cutting oneself with a sharp object. (Chapter 5.2)
Self-regulation skills: Control of oneself by oneself.50 (Chapter 5.3)
Social determinants of health (SDOH): Factors such as income, employment, socioeconomic status, education, food security, housing, social support, discrimination, childhood adversity, the social and physical conditions where people live, and their ability to access acceptable and affordable health care. (Chapter 5.2)
Spirituality: A dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which persons seek ultimate meaning, purpose, and transcendence and experience relationships to self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the significant or sacred.9 (Chapter 5.3)
Stressors: Any internal or external event, force, or condition that results in physical or emotional stress.47 (Chapter 5.3)
Stress response: The body’s endocrine and sympathetic nervous systems respond to actual or perceived stressors with the “fight, flight, or freeze.” (Chapter 5.3)
Suicidal ideation: Thinking about or formulating plans for killing oneself. (Chapter 5.2)
Trauma-informed care (TIC): An approach that uses a lens of trauma to understand the range of cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms individuals may demonstrate in health care systems. It emphasizes instilling a sense of safety, control, and autonomy in individuals’ lives and health care decisions. The basic goals of TIC are to avoid retraumatization; emphasize survivor strengths and resilience; aid empowerment, healing, and recovery; and promote the development of survivorship skills.1 (Chapter 5.2)
Unhooking: A tool to manage and decrease the impact of unwanted thoughts. (Chapter 5.3)
Voluntary admission: Admission by individuals over the age of 16 who present to a mental health facility and request hospitalization. (Chapter 5.2)