inthesky

i am a 5 month new grad bsn rn and i am really disappointed in floor nursing. i knew that it was going to be hard and i was prepared to be overworked, but this is seriously ridiculous. i recently left my psych night job due to circadian rhythm disast...

I am a new grad and have been working on a psych unit for 4 months. I like what i have been doing and I am actually pretty good at it, but night shift is destroying me. It began insidiously. First my mood started to get a little labile (i have bip...

I am still quite a new psychiatric nurse (almost one year). I still get really scared and shaken during incidents of patient violence and restraints. We had a 19 year old patient. It was her psych admit and possibly first psychotic break. She has...

I am determined to be psychiatric nurse practitioner and I must do an online program to be able to stay in Arizona. I had applied to UofA and ASU online program. UofA closed their program a few weeks ago, leaving me fearful of only having one progr...

Some online NP courses require that students pay faculty expense to visit their out-of-state clinical sites. Is this standard? It could be $1000! Plane ticket, transportation, lodging, food..etc. Anyone have experience with this? thank you =)

I work a combination of day and evening 8 hour shifts. I worked an evening 3-11 shift last night with a night nurse who is a straight-up bully. For those kindly reading all my posts, she is the same nurse who nearly got me fired for handing injecti...

At my unit, we have students once a week during semester clinical times. It is rough on the milieu as there are 10 students to 15 patients..but what are you going to do when the student-teacher ratios are so high? Anyway, I'm not sure if this is an...

You can be the nurse who is different! It is a bummer. I knew that I wanted to work psych after doing behavioral health tech work, not after nursing school rotations. I did BHT PRN for an agency. I'm not sure what is up with psych and students.

It has been 1 year and 3 months since I started my first nursing job. It has been an extremely dramatic roller coaster of events and emotions. Nursing is the most love/hate entity I have ever experienced. I started psych right away. Med-surg is t...

I think the ideal form of 'team player' is very important. At my work, the term "team player" is often perverted into a way to criticize and bully colleagues. I do my very best to help out and spend every single minute of my floor time for work. I...

I can relate. I just finished a 5 week neuropsychopathology class. It make it worse, the professor is an absent slacker and missed the first week and other than online discussions it was pure book learning without handouts or recorded lectures. 10...

I was reading this thread in amusement, deciding whether to post anything. I say far too many stupid things to ever chronicle. I tell patients to follow me around the corner (there is no corner) to my med window (it is actually a door with no windo...

My question for you is where do you want to end up? Which job will better suit that?

I have a love/hate with 3-11. good: more sleep, later bedtime, no early morning, less stressful busy shift bad: sleep too much, go to bed too late, get nothing done =P I websurf too late as well.

My unit has found yet a new way to hinder nursing practice. It is procedure to give patients handouts when they receive new medications. Being med nurse, it is extremely important to me (and my job) that patients know what medications they are taki...

Nope, it was definitely thorazine. After the patient panicked, they THEN tried trazodone. The patient still didn't really have good results; she probably needs a sleep study. As an update, the unit manager decided that this was indeed a legal issue...

I work on a small 15 bed behavioral heath unit at a local hospital. Even though the economy took a dump, our census has not really been affected. More and more people come in depressed with nervous breakdowns due to financial pressures, job and hom...

Boo to that "HR" policy of having to call every few hours and not being paid for it! Thanks for putting some things in perspective. Psych is rough to skeleton crew as our 'codes' are violent patients going off. Sometimes we can make special calls ...

hmmm mandated.. i should dig out a patient's bill of rights or something. I have my next shift tomorrow and will probably just verbally ask the doc for general med handout permission rights. If that fails, I'll just get back to the printer anyway a...

I'm a psych nurse without med surg experience. I would want to do my civic service, but this would be awkward. Keep me away from critical care patients and IV starts and I'd probably make do with supervision. =P

it is a record 101 today, so you might be in luck =P

You are definitely not an idiot =P Nurses get very little psych training and it's great that you are interested in learning! Everyone is different, but for my anxious patients.. *Let them vent. *go over all treatments one at a time without an air ...

PMHNPs (at least in my state) do much more medication than therapy. I'm a pharmacology nerd so this is ok for me, but psychology might truly be a better fit for you.

off meds + crack + meth= hearing voices. Why this surprises patients is beyond me. :trout: but well..no complaints the last few weeks. I was happy to serve a lovely group of patients.

Self-medicating with old meds is not a good idea. It is really important to take those under Dr supervision as that 'mania' could be a harmful reaction. Psych meds are so plentiful and randomly hit or miss. I've been getting mental health treatmen...