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Cultural Factors Influencing Mental Health Nursing Practice

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Introduction There are several factors that may somehow have an impact in mental health care nursing. These factors may be influenced or rendered by people in societies as a result of what they believe in and also their culture. This assignment will be discussing about the cultural factors influencing mental healthcare nursing practice, the stigma associated with mental illness and types of stigma, advantages and disadvantages of using traditional healers in mental illness and the challenges faced by mental healthcare users in terms of occupational and social functioning. Cultural factors influencing mental health nursing practice Culture has been termed in many different ways, but is still not understood well. Culture is …show more content…

Thus culture and beliefs has an impact in stigma of mental illness, for instance when a mentally ill person portrays episodes of hallucination, the society may mock that person and isolate themselves from him/her with the believe that all mentally ill people are violent and dangerous and may cause harm to others. Every society has its norms and values, which detects what is expected of every member in a form of behaviour. These values may take part in the stigma that is experienced by mentally ill people in communities, because when an individual is mentally ill, they may also change in behaviour and depict a bizarre character. The behaviour that is drawn by the mentally ill person may lead to stigma because people would isolate themselves from them because of the odd behaviour that is shown by that particular person which is against the norms and the values of the society. Nevertheless, an attitude towards mental illness can lead to stigma, because when a society has a negative attitude towards mentally ill people, stigma may …show more content…

The types of stigma are classified into two; public-stigma and self-stigma. Public-stigma is the reaction of the society towards mentally ill people, and self-stigma is the reaction of oneself towards their mental illness. However, both public and self-stigma may be defined and understood well in the following three components: Stereotype: it is when the society has a negative belief about mental health care users, for example; they believe that the individual is dangerous, incompetent and has a character weakness. Some mental health care users may commit crime as a result of their mental illness, irrespective of whether they have been taking treatment or not. Thus, the society may develop fear and exclude themselves from the mental health care users and they may even ban them from the society. The mentally ill person may not be included in decision making in their families, because of the condition they are currently facing. A negative stereotype amongst communities is that “everyone with a mental illness is violent” (Krueger 1996: p. 536). This generates negative emotional reactions as a result; people will have fear and assume that a person that is mentally ill is

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Stigma is the phenomenon whereby a person is looked upon as abnormal

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