The use of a patient-centered approach to education in mental healthcare presents a highly beneficial practice because it helps increase the mental health literacy of clients and involves them in shared decision-making with healthcare specialists. In other words, providing consumer-centered education to patients allows making the latter feel more responsible for their mental state, which can positively impact patient behavior and lifestyle habits. Informing healthcare clients and their relatives about treatment options, their benefits, and potential challenges is pivotal because minimizing the impact of patients on decision-making can deteriorate their mental health even more. The given paper is aimed at discussing patient education for depressed clients with special attention to its benefits, barriers to implementation, skills needed to provide it, and the practical importance of findings.
Patient Education on Depression and Its Benefits
Depression has a wide range of adverse health effects, and it heavily impacts people’s self-esteem, causing a sense of worthlessness and other negative feelings. Mental health education targeted at individuals with depression usually touches upon the key symptoms of the illness, factors that contribute to the development of the condition (both internal and external), and treatment options (Lopez, Sanchez, Killian, & Eghaneyan, 2018). In terms of the treatment options, they involve psychotherapy and medications. The practice of providing patients with detailed information on treatment options plays an important role in provider-patient communication, helping to prepare depressed clients for treatment and related life changes.
Consumer-centered mental health education provided to clients diagnosed with depression has a range of benefits since it helps patients to shape more informed opinions on psychotherapy and its effects. In the modern world, many people tend to associate depression with social deprivation, feeble-mindedness, and demonstrative attention-seeking behavior, which stigmatizes this condition. To put it in other words, there is a popular opinion that depression develops in weak-minded individuals who are unable to get themselves together or presents a problem of overestimated importance (Na & Chasteen, 2016). Thus, a significant benefit of mental health patient education is presented by its ability to reduce the degree to which depression is stigmatized and, therefore, help patients with this diagnosis to accept things as they are and stop feeling worthless due to the disease.
According to Lopez et al. (2018), the stigma associated with depression remains one of the key barriers to treatment, and interventions aimed at improving mental health literacy help to make negative stereotypes about depression less popular. The study conducted by Lopez et al. (2018) reveals a tradeoff between depression knowledge and the prevalence of negative stereotypes about the disease in adult patients of Hispanic origin. Different ways of presenting information can be used in patient education programs for depressed individuals, and there is evidence that providing education with the help of stories or self-awareness exercises is effective in reducing stigma against depression (Na & Chasteen, 2016).
Another significant benefit of consumer-centered education for depressed individuals is its ability to debunk myths concerning the use of antidepressants. Recent studies show that from 50 to 75% of patients diagnosed with depression fail to adhere to their medication regimens (Martinez, Xu, & Hebl, 2017, p. 451). This tendency is strictly interconnected with stereotypes about antidepressants, addiction, and their effects on mental and physical health. The impact of the latter on patients’ adherence to healthcare recommendations is successfully reduced with the help of printed materials, video/audio lectures, and personal conversations with healthcare professionals (Martinez et al., 2017). Therefore, by providing customer-centered education to depressed individuals, it is possible to debunk harmful stereotypes about depression and the use of medications during treatment, provide patients with emotional support to help them accept their situation, and, therefore, improve the outcomes of treatment.
Barriers to Education
Even though consumer-centered education on depression involves numerous benefits for both patients and their relatives, certain factors can impact the effectiveness of education programs negatively. The most common barriers to patient education are related to the organizational climate in healthcare organizations, the absence of skills needed to provide effective education, and limited access to educational resources (Livne, Peterfreund, & Sheps, 2017). Importantly, the quality of patient education can be adversely impacted by the presence of inadequate workload in healthcare facilities.
The most significant barriers to patient education are strictly interconnected with the current situation with the nurse shortage in mental healthcare in many English-speaking countries. The shortage of qualified mental health nurses continues to grow due to numerous factors, including high risks of occupational burnout, nursing students’ unrealistic expectations, and role ambiguity (Hooper, Browne, & O’Brien, 2016). The reality of mental healthcare often runs counter to the expectations of nurses since there are numerous qualities that mental health nurses should possess to be effective.
Apart from the above-mentioned barriers, the ability of healthcare specialists to provide consumer-centered education to patients with depression is also impacted by the prevalence of preconceived opinions about depression among common people. Heedless of the fact that mental health education is effective in reducing negative attitudes to depression and people who have this diagnosis, certain stereotypes still impact patients’ decision-making.
In the modern world, almost no attempts are made to ensure that common people take depression and its symptoms seriously, and this lack of awareness can turn depressed patients off and, therefore, make it even more difficult to provide effective education. The study conducted by Tobin and Lyddy (2014) shows that many media texts devoted to depression still create the links between depression, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse, and aggressive behavior. Contributing to the formation of stereotypes about individuals with depression, the representation of the disease in media presents another barrier to consumer-centered education in mental healthcare.
Providing Patient Education: Necessary Skills
As it is clear from the section devoted to benefits, the high quality of patient education in mental healthcare can make a significant contribution to positive patient outcomes. With that in mind, a great responsibility rests with nurses who provide customer-centered education to patients with depression and their relatives, and success cannot be achieved without special skills. In addition to vast professional experience and profound knowledge of depression management, nurses are expected to have advanced interpersonal and language skills.
To begin with, patients are different in terms of linguistic proficiency, personal experience, and education level. Thus, mental health nurses should be good at expressing thoughts, listening to their patients, and paraphrasing or summarizing information on treatment options and symptoms to make specific terms more clear to non-professionals (Townsend & Morgan, 2017). Apart from that, it needs to be noted that mental health nurses who provide patient education should be capable of recognizing and using non-verbal signs to achieve better outcomes. To some extent, nurses should act as good psychologists who keep track of their patients’ reactions and change the approach to teaching if necessary.
Also, an important skill is presented by the ability to consider both medical conditions and specific needs to construct individualized patient education strategies (Rupp, 2015). According to Rupp (2015), paying more attention to medical conditions than to patients’ learning abilities is among the most common mistakes that nurses make when providing patient education. Considering that clients with depression often have a lack of concentration, assessing patients’ educability prior to providing education is critical to success.
Findings and Professional Development
The findings reported by previous researchers in the field indicate the great role of patient education for clients with depression and other mental conditions, and they can be used to facilitate my further professional development. Given that customer-centered education has numerous benefits, it is important for nurses from different countries to make concerted efforts to overcome the barriers to its implementation. It can be done in different ways, including popularizing mental health nursing, supporting initiatives aimed at destigmatizing mental illness, or polishing one’s patient education skills.
In reference to the skills, all specialists working with depressed clients and their families can improve the quality of patient education by using a comprehensive approach, in which medical conditions, specific psychological needs, and educability are assessed to make education plans more individualized. Also, attention should be paid to the further development of verbal and non-verbal communication skills that include paraphrasing, summarizing information, and recognizing nonverbal cues that indicate certain emotions or concerns. The development of the above-mentioned skills helps mental health nurses to get on the right side of clients with any level of language proficiency or psychiatric knowledge.
Conclusion
To sum it up, the importance of customer-centered education for clients with depression cannot be overstated because it helps them to feel more responsible for their health or accept their situation and increases their mental health literacy. Ultimately, patient education successfully debunks myths about people with depression and antidepressant addiction, which is extremely important since many people fear to accept their problems and follow medication recommendations strictly. In terms of barriers to education, nurses have numerous opportunities to overcome them by developing their patient education skills and supporting the spread of accurate information about depression, its nature, and the necessity of pharmaceutical treatment. Many findings discussed in the paper are also applicable to general nursing, which increases their practical importance.
References
Hooper, M. E., Browne, G., & O’Brien, A. P. (2016). Graduate nurses’ experiences of mental health services in their first year of practice: An integrative review. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 25(4), 286-298.
Livne, Y., Peterfreund, I., & Sheps, J. (2017). Barriers to patient education and their relationship to nurses’ perceptions of patient education climate. Clinical Nursing Studies, 5(4), 65-72.
Lopez, V., Sanchez, K., Killian, M. O., & Eghaneyan, B. H. (2018). Depression screening and education: An examination of mental health literacy and stigma in a sample of Hispanic women. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 1-8.
Martinez, L. R., Xu, S., & Hebl, M. (2017). Utilizing education and perspective-taking to remediate the stigma of taking antidepressants. Community Mental Health Journal, 54(4), 450-459.
Na, J. J., & Chasteen, A. L. (2016). Does imagery reduce stigma against depression? Testing the efficacy of imagined contact and perspective-taking. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 46(5), 259-275.
Rupp, S. (2015). Tips to help nurses improve patient education skills. NueMD. Web.
Tobin, G., & Lyddy, F. (2014). Media representation of depression in young people: A corpus-based analysis of Irish newspaper coverage. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 31(1), 21-30.
Townsend, M. C., & Morgan, K. I. (2017). Psychiatric mental health nursing: Concepts of care in evidence-based practice (9th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: FA Davis.