What do psychiatric nurses do?

Just curious...Do you still have to take regular nursing programs beforehand or is it mainly practising the mental health field? Because I am not into anatomy or physiology but I like the mental health field. Will psychiatric nurses even be in demand in the future? Is it a good profession to go into or is it stressful?

Everything!! I am a veteran of over 40 years having been diagnosed with Schizophrenia Paranoia. I ascribe 90% of my treatment and recovery to psychiatric nurses! I have been treated primarily in VA hospitals.

There Pstchiatric nurses need to be RN's. They need to know the same things regular RN's are taught in nursing school as well as mental health and behavioral skills. A good many of them go on to get a masters degree in nursing and become Psychiatric Nurse practitioners (ARNP's) who do just about everything a psychiatrist does (and more!).

There is a great demand for nurses overall and there will always be a need for psychiatric nurses especially if our nation continues to be engaged in wars where men and women come out seriously scarred by physical and mental.
wounds.

Psychiatric nursing can be boring but only if you consider it just a job where you "kindly pass out pills". You have to have empathy for your patients! If you really get into the patients lives, which in my opinion is where a nurse is most positively beneficial, it can be stressful, because mental patients are usually the products of stressful situations.

I hope you can get over an aversion to anatomy and physiology to become a really good psychiatric nurse.

Good luck, good health, peace and love!

They usually are RN's. When I did my psych rotation, I absolutely hated it. But learned that there are alot of PA's, psychiatric assistants and they help with the group therapy, calming patients, etc. The RN's are mostly responsible for the medication distribution, the charting, uh, assessing patients physically. There is a psych hospital next to my work, a big regular medical facility, and many times patients are sent to our ER from the psych place because the pt's blood pressure is elevated or they were in a fight and need stitches, usually with the cutters, we need to bandage them frequently. Hope this helps.....

You need to have some nursing skills but you do not NEED to be a full registered nurse.
They dispense a patients medications (especially for patients who cannot dispense the medications to themselves) and they do paperwork tracking what patients are taking and how well they follow the program. Sometimes they help the patients by calling in the prescription to the pharmacy that the psychiatrist has written.

The psychiatric nurses I worked with had prescription privileges. Essentially, they had the same role of the a psychiatrist, except all their work had to be supervised by a psychiatrist. More complex patients were transferred to the psychiatrist. I worked in the student health center at a Big 10 university. The psych nurses were extremely knowledgeable, well-respected and well paid. I'm sure the role differs depending on the setting. Personally, I do think this is great profession to go into. A psychiatric nurse will remain in demand because they a cost effective way for an agency to provide psychiatric services without employing a full-time psychiatrist.