Vicarious Resilience in Mental Health Nursing: A Discursive Review Through Carper's Fundamental Patterns of Knowing

Vicarious resilience is a relatively new concept that illustrates the positive effect on professionals who assist trauma survivors; this concept was recently utilized in mental health nursing. This discursive review aims to show how this concept can be explored and applied through the integration of Carper's four fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing: empirics, ethics, esthetics, and personal knowing, to determine how well it relates to mental health nursing clinical practice; it showed how it is essential to integrate the Carper fundamental pattern of knowing into vicarious resilience. The empirical pattern of knowing indicates that vicarious resilience is developed through grounded theory based on observations of patients and the arising ethical issue of transference and countertransference, which is wrongly paired with the concept of vicarious resilience. Stressing the importance of personal knowing, which involves the mental health nurse's self-awareness and recognition of their values and beliefs, reinforces the exploration of how patient personal narratives and nurse self-reflection enhance vicarious resilience. Moreover, the article shows how esthetic patterns are reflected through listening to the patients and admiring their artwork to serve as the essence of esthetics in vicarious resilience.