Abstract
M.Cur.
In Botswana, the emphasis of mental health services is on the prevention of
mental illness, the promotion of mental health, treatment and rehabilitation of the
mentally ill.
However, guidelines for psychiatric nurse practitioners to follow when executing
the above-mentioned services are non-existent, resulting in the difficulties in
rendering the services.
The researcher has also observed that chronic mentally ill people in the
community are dependent on their caretakers in meeting almost all their daily
living activities. This results in frequent admissions to the psychiatric unit as the
caretakers attempt to lessen the burden of having to take care of these people.
To explore this observation further, the researcher conducted a study on the lifestories
of chronic mentally ill people in the community. The objectives of the
study were to:
Explore and describe the life-stories of chronic mentally ill people in the
community.
Describe guidelines for psychiatric nurse practitioners to support chronic
mentally ill people in the community to master their daily living activities.
The researcher used the framework of .the Theory for Health Promotion in
Nursing (Rand Afrikaans University, Department of Nursing, 1999), which has an
approach that is Christian-based, strives towards excellence and views chronic
mentally ill people holistically in an integrated bio-psychosocial manner (body,
mind and spirit). A functional reasoning approach based on Botes' model (1994) was followed. A
qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual research design was used to
answer the research questions. In-depth, semi-structured phenomenological
interviews were conducted with chronic mentally ill people who met the sample
criteria.
To persuade my audience that the findings of this research are worth paying
attention to, Guba's (Lincoln & Guba, 1985:290) model of trustworthiness was
used.
Data analysis was done according to Tesch's (in Creswell, 1994:155) method.
The results of this study show that chronic mentally ill people in the community
who were identified as respondents in the study are depressed due to mental
illness. Their depression was evidenced by hopelessness, social isolation, lifestyle
changes and dependency syndromes. Based on these results, guidelines
were developed for psychiatric nurse practitioners to support chronic mentally ill
people in the community to master their daily living activities.
Conclusions were drawn and recommendations were made concerning
psychiatric nursing practice, nursing education, research and the policy makers.