Technologic advances in psychiatric nursing

This is an exciting time to be involved with the care of patients with mental illness. More and more information about what is happening in the brain when mental illness develops is becoming available. Even more important, however, clinicians need not be seduced by the secrets of the brain being discovered. Psychiatric nurses must remember that patients have real and frightening experiences. They alone must learn to adapt and function with their symptoms of mental illness. To the degree that clinicians become enamored of the science and technology, they may lose their empathy with the human experience of mental illness [11]. Nurses, who help people respond to their illnesses, must engage the science with curiosity and engage the person with empathy.