Review slides, as needed

1. Mental Health and Mental Illness
Chapter 20

2. Characteristics
• 7 traits of people who are mentally healthy
– Can get along with others
– Adaptable
– Can care for self and others
– Can give and accept love
– Uses healthy coping mechanisms
– Takes responsibility for own actions, decisions,
feelings
– Behaves appropriately, has impulse control

3. 4 Causes of Mental Illness
• Physical problems
– Illness, disability – inability to cope appropriately
• Emotional Trauma, poor family environment
• Heredity
• Stress
– Produces poor coping mechanisms when mentally

4. Fact and Fallacy
• Fact – something that is true
• Fallacy – something that is not true
• Fact – Mental Illness is a disease
• Fallacy – People have control over this
disease.
• Fact: Mental Retardation is a permanent
condition
• Fact: Mental illness is not the same as MR.

5. Physical Health and Mental Health
• Big connection
• They affect one another

6. Communicating with Mentally Ill
Patients
• Practice active listening
• Eye to eye contact
• Professional
• Respect and dignity
• Appropriate distance
• Avoid arguments

7. Common Defense mechanisms
• Coping mechanisms – unhealthy
– Response to stress
– Not being honest with self or others
• Denial
• Projection
• Displacement
• Rationalization
• Repression
• Regression Let’s read definitions on pg 368

8. Mental Illness
• Anxiety
– Uneasiness/fear about a situation
– Symptoms can show physically- racing heart,
clammy skin
– Phobias-unrational fear of things
– Panic disorder
– OCD
– PTSD

9. Mental Illness (continued)
• Depression
– Clinical depression very serious
– If untreated, may result in suicide
– Not a normal reaction to stress
• Symptoms
– Apathy
– Extreme sadness
– Inability to get out of bed
– Decreased appetite
– Increased pain

10. Other diagnoses
• Bipolar disorder
– Manic-depressive
• Schizophrenia
– Possible visual and/or auditory hallucinations
• Paranoid schizophrenia
– “the are out to get me!!”

11. Treatment
• Medications
• Psychotherapy
• ECT

12. NA ROLE
• Observe and report changes
• Provide emotional support to resident and
family
• Encourage self care
• Be patient
• Always treat with dignity and respect – people
respond very well to this…they have had very
little of it in their lives generally

13. Things to report…
• Any talk of self-harm or hurting others
• Mood changes
• Failure to take meds – cheeking
• c/o physical symptoms
• Inappropriate behavior