What Is a Psychiatric Nurse?

Video transcription

My name is Concessa Hunziger, I am an LPN. I work for Heartland Occupational Medicine and what a psychiatric nurse is, is a nurse who is on a psychiatric floor. They deal with patients who are mentally ill. There are a number of mental illnesses out there. I'm sure a lot of them have probably been in the news. There is bipolar, there is personality disorders, schizophrenia, there is a lot of different types. That's something you also learn about in school. Psychiatry is definitely a difficult area but it's interesting, it's very interesting to delve into somebodies mind and try to figure out you know, what's causing them to be not. As a psychiatric nurse if you are on a Psych ward, as they call it, or psychiatric floor you have to monitor the patients, pretty much every fifteen minutes or so. Where they're at, what they're doing, to make sure that they are safe, that they're not trying to hurt themselves or anybody else because some of these people are dealing with hearing voices in their heads that tell them to do things. Or to harm themselves or to harm others. Or they see things that aren't there that may possibly be trying to hurt them or somebody else. So you're just, your main effort is to keep them safe, that is your first and utmost job, is to keep them safe, to keep themselves from harming themselves or others. That's your biggest one. But when I worked on the mental health floor we had to monitor them every fifteen minutes. We had groups you know, try to get them back into dealing with reality the best way that they possibly could because of course they can't do it the way we do it because being with the mental illness. Their chemicals, their brain function does not function the way ours do. So it's pretty complicated but it's pretty interesting just the same. So, thank you for watching this piece on what a psychiatric nurse does. My name is Concessa Hunziger I'm an LPN for Heartland Occupational Medicine.