Aggressive Behavior: Nurse-Patient Relationship in Mental Health Setting

Mental disorder is known to be as a loss of existential paradigm; individual's functioning is lacking in all areas. Therefore, it is difficult to point out what the patients exactly need because their needs are set on a broad range of a difficult boundary. The level of care that follows will be complex and multifactorial because nursing will challenge the interaction with the individual as a whole: behaviors and relations with family members. At this stage exploring interpersonal conflicts, with past and present aggression behaviors will be crucial.

Aim of this paper is to investigate the professional experience in a work context where the patient's clinical condition poses a daily challenge from a physical and emotional perspective. Narrative investigation is performed here in order to explore the psychological load of the professional's psychological experience and its implication in facing aggressive situations. Moreover, this investigation highlights the importance of some professional and personal resources that can be made available to the operator.

These tools could improve the understanding of the subjective experience of acute events guiding the individual through an exploration of the phenomenology of what happened decreasing the intimate stress load.

A constant updating, the knowledge of de-escalation techniques and sharing the experience in dedicated settings could be important allies in the management of risk events.