GNUR 501 Assignment 3.5 Evaluation of Literature on Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing

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GNUR 501 Assignment 3.5 

Evaluation of Literature on Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing

Student Name

Division of Nursing, IWU School of Integrated Health

GNUR-501: Evidence-Based Communication

Prof.

September 2025

Evaluation of Literature on Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing

My field of expertise is psychiatric mental health nursing. Psychiatric nurses operating in this specialty are in a very critical position to strike the right balance between clinical judgment, ethical practice, and compassionate care of vulnerable groups of people. This is not a research paper, but an evaluation of literature, and the paper criticizes and reviews some selected scholarly articles addressing psychiatric mental health nursing. Two separate articles will be critiqued in the literature critique section for identifying the main problem in them, the presence of author bias, strengths and limitations, and relevance to theory and practice, and the relevance to my nursing expertise paper. Two other articles will be incorporated into the review of literature section, where their contribution to the common practices, best practices, or current research, and ethical dilemmas in psychiatric nursing will be summarized. The paper will also end by determining the best and the worst articles, and the contribution that the rest of the articles will bring to the development of psychiatric nursing knowledge.

Literature Critique

Article One

The article discussed is “The psychiatric mental health nurse’s ethical considerations regarding the use of coercive measures,” written by Manderius et al. and published in BMC Nursing in 2023 in Volume 22, Article number 23. The authors explored the experience of psychiatric mental health nurses in ethical decision-making in situations that necessitated coercive action in psychiatric inpatient care.

The theme of the issue presented in this article was that the ethical dilemma of patient autonomy versus patient safety in acute psychiatric settings is complex. It was a qualitative research in the form of an interview, and no apparent author bias was identified in reporting and analyzing the results. The article was strong in the sense that it had a strong qualitative content analysis of verbatim interviews, which offered deep insight into the process of moral reasoning by the nurses. One weakness, though, was that the study was geographically limited to southern Sweden and thus limited the generalizability of its results to other cultural or health care settings.

The article is applicable in both theory and practice in that it emphasizes the use of ethical concepts like autonomy, beneficence, and justice in informing the nursing care of a psychiatric patient. It is suitable for this paper because it presents the issue of my nursing expertise directly by the example of establishing the subject of ethical dilemmas, namely the use of coercion that continues to be topical today in the practice of psychiatric mental health nursing.

Article Two

The article, entitled “The future of psychiatric-mental health nursing: Observe, reflect, and take action to empower knowledge for the greater good,” was written by Soltis-Jarrett and published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing in 2023 in Volume 44, Issue 10, on pages 1071–1079. This article was an act of conceptual activism as it addressed the future of psychiatric mental health nursing and the need to break stigma, inequity, and silos between professions.

The main problem discussed in this article was that psychiatric nursing has to change according to the changes and challenges of society, such as the stigma, unfair systems, and the necessity of new models of leadership. No evident bias of the author in this article was present; however, the tone of his work is rather passionate, which can indicate that the author is an advocate and not an objective commentator. One of the strong points was that this work also boldly addressed the problem of ancient stigmas and systemic obstacles that persist in influencing the delivery of psychiatric care. The main limitation, however, was that it lacked empirical research and data collection instruments and was therefore an opinion-driven article, as opposed to an evidence-based analysis.

The article can be utilized in relation to the theory by setting the socio-political and professional issues in psychiatric mental health nursing. It is appropriate for my expertise paper as it is able to give a good background on stigma and structural issues, although it fails to give specific evidence-based practice techniques.

Review of Literature

Two other articles have been reviewed. One was a scoping review of mental health nurses’ roles and identities, and the other investigated the strategies of enhancing psychological safety in mental health services. Collectively, the articles provided some insight into general practice, best practice, and ethical dilemmas in psychiatric mental health nursing (Hunt et al., 2021; Hurley et al., 2022).

Both articles outlined the common multifaceted role of psychiatric mental health nurses who embark on the use of both technical and interpersonal skills. The practices mentioned in the scoping review include psychotherapy, risk assessment, and diagnostic support, and the significance of communication, advocacy, and decreasing the power disparities between staff and patients is also mentioned (Hurley et al., 2022). The paper on psychological safety highlighted the practices that allowed staff to voice their concerns without any fear of persecution, and open communication was cited as an established norm in safe mental health facilities (Hunt et al., 2021). Collectively, these results showed that communication, advocacy, and professional identity are broadly accepted to be core practices in psychiatric nursing.

The best practices found in these two sources were the systematic methods to improve psychological safety on individual, team, and organizational levels and the mobilization of the mental health nursing workforce in a manner that optimizes clinical and relational skills. The reviews implied that role clarity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and safety-based organizational culture were synergistic practices that reflect state-of-the-art in mental health nursing today (Hunt et al., 2021; Hurley et al., 2022).

There were ethical considerations that were made. In the scoping review, it was observed that mental health nurses usually face ethical dilemmas between therapeutic intimacy and custodial care, which provokes the issue of autonomy and power. The article on psychological safety emphasized the moral necessity to establish an atmosphere of safety where employees will be able to voice safety issues without intimidation, which will directly affect patient safety and professional responsibility. The two views showed that ethical issues in psychiatric nursing take place at the individual-patient level and at the organization-system level (Hunt et al., 2021; Hurley et al., 2022).

Conclusion

The article by Manderius et al. (2023) titled “The psychiatric mental health nurse ethical consideration of the use of coercive measures” was the best one, as it presented abundant empirical information on the ethical justification of psychiatric nurses and presented both practical and theoretical insights. The poorest article was “The future of psychiatric-mental health nursing: Observe, reflect, and take action to empower knowledge to the greater good” (Jarrett, 2023), as, despite having a very interesting conceptual framework, it lacked empirical evidence to prove its statements and, therefore, was not applicable in practice. The articles three and four will become part of the expertise paper by helping to support a discussion on the relevance of the organizational culture to psychological safety and highlighting the underutilized and varied clinical roles of psychiatric nurses (Hunt et al., 2021; Hurley et al., 2022).