Person-Centered Mental Health Nursing Practice: Understanding Lived Experiences of Mental Disorder

MENTAL HEALTH-NURSING 1
Mental Health-Nursing
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MENTAL HEALTH-NURSING 2
Introduction:
Person-centered care means putting individuals together with their families at the center of
decisions and seeing them as professionals working together with experts to acquire the best
results. The term can also be referred to as patient-centered, user-centered or family-centered.
Person-centered nursing practice is portrayed as care that respects individuals, values them and
organizes care to meet their needs. It has been noted that individuals who have experienced
mental illness can add up to the development of person-centred care. Collaborative mental health
nursing practice needs the interaction between clients and nurses to maintain a relationship with
the clients to ensure the care is client-centered.
Discuss how an understanding of peoples' lived experiences of a mental disorder can
contribute to the development of person-centered psychological health nursing practice.
Person-centered mental health nursing practice entails handling clients as people and not
handling them according to their condition to protect their dignity and their rights respected.
People with lived experience represent consumers whose experiences emulate the people
presently receiving services. To change the way in which providers of a mental health care think
about their clients, advancement of competencies in recovery-oriented care has been utilized in
mental health systems (Australian Health Ministers' Advisory Council, 2013). The understanding
of the recovery has been boosted by involving individuals with lived experiences of a
psychological disorder who provide advice to individuals who might be facing the same
problem.
The individuals who have lived with the experience of mental illness are willing to give
suggestions depicting from their own experiences such as poverty, depression, and distress along

MENTAL HEALTH-NURSING 3
with resilience and recovery experiences. Moreover, they reassure those people with the problem
that things will be good and they should persevere and be persistent for better results at the end.
Also, they advise them to look for assistance, take care of themselves by accepting the illness
and taking precautions to prevent becoming unwell and maintain social involvement (Happell,
Cowin, Roper, Lakeman and Cox, 2013). Furthermore, they advise the people to create a
relationship with their providers by being honest and open to the practitioners. Since they have
the facts about what the patients are experiencing, then they can understand them in an emphatic
manner.
The people with lived experience of mental disorder have the responsibility of educating
the whole community on the issues concerning mental health and how to help the community to
support the people involved in the health problem on a process of recovering rather than the
route of a permanent ailment. From their experience, the experts understand what has been done
to support them and what needs to be developed. In that case, they can provide a distinctive
outlook on the effect of a present or a future policy along with assisting decision makers to
comprehend how the change can be executed (Happell, Cowin, Roper, Lakeman and Cox, 2013).
Experts by experience have moved mental health from a medical facility to a recovery
facility via contributing to personal recovery (Slade and Longden, 2015). They disprove stigma
and prejudice concerning the capability of individuals with a lived experience to live
independent and have a fruitful life. Because of their inherent capacity to support and
comprehend people affected by the mental disorder they have the aptitude to develop person-
centered psychological health nursing practices.