Excited for psych clinical!!

[decembergrad2011]

I'm getting ready to go into my FIFTH semester of my BSN program (Hallelujah, right?!) and it's psychiatric nursing and public health. While I like public health, I'm absolutely in love with the idea of psych nursing, and I've always been more drawn to that population. I was the nursing student that got in trouble for talking to my patients for too long in the room during med-surg clinicals. And whenever possible, I requested patients that had a psych background because I was fascinated to see how the connections played out to their physical health.

Anyone that has been through psych clinicals - I'd love to hear your thoughts. Did you feel like it gave a good experience? Were you ever frightened by your patients or the milieu? What about paperwork? What kind of interventions were you allowed to perform?

Thanks!

[decembergrad2011, BSN, RN]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but my psychiatric in-patient clinical rotation is over now. Kind of sad it's over! I really enjoyed it.

I wanted to talk about my experience a bit:

I was able to do a lot of things and see a biiiiig variety of patients. Schizophrenia, bipolar, a couple personality disorders, lots of substance abuse, and lots of sad stories. There was an adolescent unit and I spent a couple of days over there. I got to lead a group and I accompanied patients to groups and participated at times. I did a lot of therapeutic communication, and I actually did a bit of psychotherapy with a couple of my patients. Lots of goal setting with the patient, and it was cool to see patients optimistic about making better lifestyle choices and getting back on track with meds.

The only patient I felt very uncomfortable engaging was a patient with schizophrenia having very bad auditory and visual hallucinations. I took her after report trying to be proactive, but totally fudged up my attempts to communicate because I was scared of freaking her out or her thinking I was a hallucination. I'm sure my anxiety transferred over to her. It makes me want to jump back on that horse and talk to more patients with schizophrenia in the future though

My next part of the psych clinical is outpatient and we do groups and otherwise psych interventions in a community setting. Looking forward to see what this will be like. I have kids ages 6-13 in my outpatient setting, so we are doing lots of art therapy :)

[healthstar, BSN, RN]

Psych rotation was the worse experience ever. I hated everything about it, now I know that it is not for me. So depressing and I hate sitting down all day. It was hard for me to keep a conversation going, especially when the stories were not real. God bless psych nurses!!!