Mental Health Nursing Report: Patient Care and Complex Issues Analysis

This report addresses the multifaceted challenges encountered in mental health nursing, emphasizing the complexities of patient care, particularly for individuals with multiple and complex mental health issues. The report highlights the difficulties faced by healthcare professionals, such as the need for varied treatment methods, including pre-counseling interviews and diagnostic testing. It presents a case study of a 30-year-old man named Matthew, who suffers from a history of self-harm, alcohol use disorder, and borderline personality disorder due to childhood sexual abuse. The report identifies key challenges, including lack of support from family and government funding disparities between urban and rural areas. It also underscores the absence of minimum standards for non-drug treatments like counseling. The analysis references key literature, including works by Van der Kolk (2017), Svanberg (2014), Noddings (2015), and Cook et al. (2017), to support its findings and conclusions.

MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
Name
Institution
Course
Date

2
The challenges faced while taking care of patients with multiple and complex mental
health issues are fundamental to the treatment of this disorder. There are various issues raised by
the assessment and application of treatment techniques used to treat these patients. Healthcare
professionals are sometimes forced to apply multiple methods such as pre-counseling interviews,
diagnostic testing, and questionnaires (Van der Kolk, 2017, p.401). Patients diagnosed with
mental disorders due to occurrences which happened to them at a particular time in their life can
experience multiple diseases in the future. This is why in the case study Matthew who is a 30
years man has a history of self-harm which made him be admitted to an acute unit because his
situation was worsening after he discovered that he was a victim of sexual abuse when he was a
child. This situation resulted into other complications, and in the acute unit, he was diagnosed
with alcohol use disorder which is a condition in which a person tends to take a lot of alcohol
uncontrollably due to stressful situations as a way of forgetting their past experiences (Svanberg,
2014). His health condition forced healthcare professionals to give him a medical diagnosis of
borderline personality disorder. Despite the problems faced by patients due to mental illness,
healthcare professionals and other caregivers face a lot of challenges as they take care of these
patients.
Lack of support is the first challenge faced while taking care of patients who present
multiple and complex health issues. Mental health professionals especially psychologists
perform poor jobs of monitoring patients with mental illness due to lack of support from family
members and other individuals who are also responsible for taking care of these patients.
Inadequate funding from the government and other parties is another challenge faced by
individual providing healthcare services to patients with multiple and complex mental illnesses.
Even though most countries have arrangements to fund healthcare institutions dealing with a

3
mental illness similar to Matthew’s only a few parts of the country have access to these funds.
Recent studies which have been conducted indicates that urban areas have access to these funds
and government support and thus in most cases, healthcare centers in rural areas never have
access to these funds which lead to poor treatments of mental illness due to lack of proper
facilities and equipment (Noddings, 2015). Lack of minimum standards while taking care of
patients with multiple and complex health issues is another major challenge which is facing
caregivers supporting these patients. This is because non-drug treatments which have to be
offered to patients like Matthew like counseling due to their past experiences lack minimum
standards which creates a lot of hardships while determining whether the therapies administered
to a patient are safe or not. Patients with complex and multiple health issues like Matthew are
challenging and thus require a lot of attention to avoid withdrawal (Cook et al., 2017, p.390).
This is why Matthew after discovering that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child become a
drug addict as a defensive mechanism to forget the painful past experiences.

4
Bibliography
Cook, A., Spinazzola, J., Ford, J., Lanktree, C., Blaustein, M., Cloitre, M., DeRosa, R., Hubbard,
R., Kagan, R., Liautaud, J. and Mallah, K., 2017. Complex trauma in children and
adolescents. Psychiatric annals, 35(5), pp.390-398.
Noddings, N., 2015. The challenge to care in schools, 2nd Editon. Teachers College Press.
Svanberg, J., 2014. Introduction. In Alcohol and the Adult Brain (pp. 11-14). Psychology Press.
Van der Kolk, B.A., 2017. Developmental Trauma Disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for
children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric annals, 35(5), pp.401-408.