Author: Sana Rehman
In mental health studies, suicide is a significant issue that needs to be addressed with the help of the nursing staff in clinical settings. Researchers has focused on suicidal issues and the reasons are made known to avoid the future cases of suicide. Mostly, the reasons are hard to anticipate in advance but once a patient survives, it becomes the ethical duty of the nurses to take effective care of these patients (Sheehan, et al., 2019). Nurse teachers can teach effective strategies to their student nurses about how to implement theories in the real work settings to save the patients who tried to commit suicide (Sun, Long, Chiang & Chou, 2019).
“In mental health, when depression exceeds the highest levels of endurance, people tend to commit suicide and a nurse is charged with the duty to develop effective strategies which can bring back the patients towards the normal course of life."Most of the people commit suicide to get rid of psychological pain and their mental weakness offers them a solution to end up their lives because they find no charm in a life with problems. This is a serious form of self-harm and many people die during the suicide attempt. Therapies used to help out the survivors is the need of the clinical best practices and nurses have to perform their role in making the patients hopeful about life.
The negative thoughts must be removed from the mind of the patient and effective communication along with kind words of empathy will increase the chances of the speedy recovery of suicidal patients (Rudd & Roberts, 2019). Suicide has also become 10th biggest reason of the deaths in the USA and in the past 15 years, this rate has increased rapidly because of the mental health issues and incapability of the people to face the realities of life with courage. To prevent the precious lives of people from the attempts of suicide, national suicide preventive policies have been developed. These policies will be implemented with the help of health care providers and nurses will take care of all those who are going through severe mental issues and have tried to commit suicide once (Hogan, 2020).
In the hospitals and clinical settings, dealing with emergency cases of suicide is an important task. Healthcare providers have to take special care of these cases. The standards and recovery measures need to be implemented immediately because the number of patients with suicide risks is increasing day by day (Zhou, et. al., 2019). Most of the people are prone to suicidal attacks because they have low self-esteem, nurses can make efforts to engage these people in positive thoughts and can increase their self-esteem.
Nurses can also provide social support and this will remove the disappointment and despair from the lives of depressed people (Matel-Anderson, Bekhet & Garnier-Villarreal, 2019). Nurses have to fulfill another ethical guideline in which trust is developed between the patient and the nurse. This trust is maintained through open communication and respect shown towards the patient. This strategy will not only offer help to the unique cases but can also be documented for further use in psychiatric nursing practices (Vandewalle, et. al., 2019).
In Australia, NMBA (Nursing and Midwifery Board of
Australia) Standards define the ethical roles of nurses and midwives. These
standards guide the nurses to deal with the patients and their families in an
appropriate manner. Those patients who are brought unconscious in the
hospitals, they need the support of the nurses because they cannot move their
bodies. So, nurses need to take care of those patients with care and affection.
The families of such patients need empathy and nurses need to treat the family
members of the patients with empathy. To those patients, who have tried to
commit suicide, nurses must take care for the usage of those technologies which
are aimed to save the lives of such patients (Aitken, Marshall & Chaboyer,
2019).
While most of the nurses are not aware of the
strategies and interventions used in clinical practices when they are dealing
with a patient prone to suicide. This must be learned through a formal platform
where the senior nurses can train junior nurses on the matters to handle the
people at risk of suicide.
This learning will be used in treating theses patients but ethical aspects to
treat them will be kept at the priority (Gilje, 2018).
One ethical duty of the nurses is to get training on how to handle patients
with suicide risk. If they have not leaned the practices during their
education, they need to show agreeableness to go through a training program
because they can save a lot of lives this way if they learn practices to deal
with the suicide patients. Nurses need to be quick and efficient while handling
emergencies of suicidal patients because carelessness in that critical time may
take the life of the patient. On the other hand, a careful and responsible
attitude of a nurse can save the life of a patient. This will be helpful in the
recovery of the patient when the nurse will be able to handle the patient
according to the specific needs (Siau, 2019).
One main goal of the nursing
practices in mental health is to accept the reality and to positively view
suicide to move towards solution finding. Nurses are ethically bound to
understand the needs of the patients and to convert their negative feelings and
depression into positive and productive thoughts with the help of effective
communication (Flood, 2019).
Hence, it is concluded that due to increased depression in society, the
rate of suicide has gone up. Nurses have to play their major role in the
treatment of suicidal patients and their mental wellbeing can be improved if
the nurses take care of these patients in an ethical manner according to the
NMBA standards. Moral support provided by the positive behavior and treatment
of a nurse will help the patients to combat the negative thoughts and to come
out of depression. This can save a lot of lives by instilling positive thoughts
and showing empathetic behavior towards suicidal patients.