Integrative Nursing and Mental Health

Integrative nursing offers exciting opportunities to create new models of integrative mental health care to meet growing demands by patients and providers, especially when it comes to access to the broad range of interventions needed to promote mental health and reduce the impact of mental illness. This becomes ever more important as less inclusive treatment paradigms become more prominent in the treatment of mental health disorders. Integrative nursing and psychiatric mental health nursing share many of the same historical emphasis points, including the focus on the therapeutic alliance and the individual needs of the client. This shared heritage lends the fusion of the two, strong face value as well as a strong, mutually beneficial philosophical foundation. Integrative mental health nursing builds on the six principles of integrative nursing to develop a plan for integrated health services based on a whole-person, whole-systems approach using a careful risk benefit analysis.