Getting burnt out?

I'm currently a nursing student in my last rotation. :balloons: I'll be graduating in July. I'm currently torn between two areas that are at total opposite ends of the spectrum - NICU and psych. I know I would love to be in the NICU taking care of the sick babies, but psych is really my one true love. I just find it very interesting and I'd love the opportunity to work with mentally ill patients.

Currently I work as a PCA in the float pool at our really small local hospital. They have a mental health unit that I get sent to maybe 20% of the time and I always enjoy it down there. The staff is wonderful and overall I love the hospital, plus it's close to home. The rotation I'm in now is psych and I just KNEW it'd make me want to go in that direction more since it's the clinical I'd have just before graduating. Maybe that's a sign that I should do it? Heh, I don't know.

Most of the patients we get are usually just going through a depressive phase, or are suicidal. There's always a few really sick ones though, but the majority are not psychotic. I'm worried that I'd get burnt out 'babysitting' the very sick ones. I don't mean for that to sound bad, I couldn't think of a better way to put it. I know that as a PCA we've had geriatric patients that must stay confined to a chair or something for fear that they'd fall or some that go into other people's rooms thinking it's theirs. I know that as a PCA I get very frustrated with these patients because you have to keep an eye on them the entire shift when you have a lot of other things to do. Then again, possibly it's more of a PCA job to make sure they stay in the chair/don't wander into places they shouldn't be.

For all of you psych nurses - do you feel burned out at all? This is basically the only concern I have because I'm scared that if I want to leave psych to do something else then I'll have lost a lot of my med/surg skills. I know what the job entails and I love it...I just really don't want to burn out.

Any replies would be appreciated! Even if it's just 'I love my job!'.