Forensic Mental Health Nursing: Treatment and Ethical Dilemmas

This essay provides an overview of forensic mental health nursing, highlighting the psychosocial factors contributing to disruptive behavior in individuals with psychiatric illnesses and the correlation between mental health and crime. It addresses the challenges faced by practitioners in treating patients, including violence and the need to balance patient autonomy with necessary involuntary treatment under the Mental Health Act. The essay also touches on the ethical considerations and the importance of providing proper care to patients with mental health disorders, referencing relevant literature and legal frameworks in Australia. Desklib offers this essay as a resource for students studying forensic mental health nursing, providing insights into the complexities and considerations within this field.

Running head: FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

1FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
Forensic mental health nursing
Several psychosocial factors has been found to be responsible for the disruptive behavior
in individuals with psychiatric illness. The psychosocial factors can be hostility, stress,
depression, hopelessness and job control. Psychiatry and crime are often related. The mentally ill
are often referred to the criminal justice system because of the poor and inappropriate resources
in the mental health sector (Matcheswalla & De Sousa, 2015). It can be seen that that social
factors like poverty, marginalization, discrimination or grief might lead to mental health issues.
Individuals with mental health issues might indulge themselves in heinous crimes intentionally
and unintentionally. The impact of both intentional and unintentional crimes can have profound
effect on the physical health of both the offender and associated people like friends, wife parents
(Matcheswalla & De Sousa, 2015).
The practitioners feces several challenges in order to treat patients with psychiatric
mental illness. As per the mental health act, it is the duty of the health care professionals to
enable involuntary the commitment and the treatment suffering from acute psychiatric illness.
The legislation of Australia to treat psychiatric patient complies with the mental health act.
According to the Mental health act, patients should have the autonomy to continue a treatment.
In many cases, it might not be feasible to take consent of the patient depending upon the severity
of violence (The Royal Australian & New Zealand college of Psychiatrics., 2017). Some of the
other challenges involve violence displayed by the psychiatric patients, which makes it difficult
for the practitioners to reach the patient. Providing care to the normal setting might bring harm to
the normal patients. In spite of several risk while assessing the patients with mental health
disorder, every patient is has got the right to receive proper treatment.

2FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
References
Matcheswalla, Y., & De Sousa, A. (2015). Crime and psychiatry. Mens sana monographs, 13(1),
143-9.
The Royal Australian & New Zealand college of Psychiatrics., (2017). .Mental health legislation
- Australia and New Zealand . Access date: 23.3.2019. Retrieved
from:https://www.ranzcp.org/publications/guidelines-and-resources-for-practice/mental-
health-legislation-australia-and-new-zealan