Abstract
South Africa as a country has limited resources with which to provide for the mental health needs of its population. The high rates of common mental disorders (CMD) such as anxiety and depression which, according to the South African Stress and Health (SASH) study, affects one in six individuals (Stein, Williams, & Kessler, 2009) increases the demand for mental health care on state facilities. The WHO-AIMS (2007) report revealed that in South Africa there are only 9.3 mental health workers to every 100,000 citizens, and as more than half of the South African population use primary health care (PHC) clinics to obtain medical care (Stats SA, 2011) the burden of mental health care is increasingly assigned to nurses in PHC clinics. The importance of this research is that it provides new data on PHC nurses’ perceptions of their level of mental health literacy, mental disorders and the mental health care needs of their patients. ‘Mental Health Literacy’, a phrase coined by Jorm and colleagues (1997), is defined as “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid in their recognition, management or prevention. Mental health literacy includes the ability to recognise specific disorders; knowing how to seek mental health information; knowledge of risk factors and causes, of self-treatments, and of professional help available; and attitudes that promote recognition and appropriate help-seeking” (p. 182). The relevance of this research is that it creates insight into the extent to which PHC nurses are willing and able to provide comprehensive mental health care, how they feel about poor mental health and what their expectations and roles are in mental health care. Semi-structured interviews with eight PHC nurses were conducted, analysed and interpreted using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which resulted in the development of three superordinate themes: (1) Understanding Mental Disorders; (2) Boundaries versus Empathy; and (3) Mental Health in Clinics: Policy versus Practice. According to the National Mental Health Policy Framework and Strategic Plan 2013-2020, (Department of Health, 2013), a few mental health courses for PHC nurses have been conducted, however, limited research on the outcomes of these training programmes have been conducted. Nurses are expected to be able to correctly identify mental health symptomology, understand the causes of mental health disorders and determine if the patients should be referred to a specialist or managed by the PHC staff. Within this context, this research is an exploration of the perceptions and beliefs of PHC nurses with regards to psychiatric disorders and the mental health needs of their patients.
M.A. (Psychology)