What Is Mental Health?

Abstract

The health of everyone is affected by physical, psychological and social factors and nursing care is unlikely to be effective unless it encompasses the needs of the whole person. You may never have contemplated nursing mentally ill people, although in planning care in other contexts it is likely that you have identified problems relating to mental health as well as physical health. There are, of course, clients who are primarily mentally ill and there are those who are primarily physically ill, but the nurse should aim always to practise holistically, so all nurses need some mental health knowledge and experience in order to: