Salutogenic-Oriented Mental Health Nursing: Strengthening Mental Health Among Adults with Mental Illness

Abstract

This chapter focuses on mental health promotion with a salutogenic understanding of mental health as an individual’s subjective well-being encompassing both feelings and functioning. Mental health is an ever-present aspect of life, relevant for everybody; thus, to promote mental health is a universal ambition. Our chapter is written with adults with mental illness in need of mental health nursing in mind. To understand the present and make suggestions for the future, knowledge of the past is needed. We elaborate on historical trends of nursing, nursing models, and the hospital setting to support our statement; persons with mental illness need a more complete mental health nursing care, including salutogenic mental health promotion. In the last part of the chapter, we introduce the salutogenic-oriented mental health nursing, and further showing how salutogenesis can be integrated in nursing care for persons with mental illness. As well as elaborating on the features of salutogenic-oriented mental health nursing, and briefly present the Act-Belong-Commit framework for mental health promotion as an example of salutogenesis in nursing practice.

Public health nurses' experiences with mental health promotion for adolescent immigrants in schools: A qualitative study

“…The findings reveal that the PHN understanding of adolescent immigrants' mental health is that just like most adolescents it has positive and negative aspects. The findings are consistent with the concepts of salutogenic theory, which describes mental health as having both positive and negative aspects with individuals flourishing or languishing depending on their state [4,15,16,30]. The findings caution against focusing solely on the negative elements of adolescent immigrants' mental health and neglecting the positive aspects.…”

“…Mental health is a state of well-being that includes positive feelings or emotional well-being, and positive functioning which includes psychological and social well-being, where one flourishes. The opposite or negative aspects are where one languishes [15,16]. While this applies to anyone, immigrants can experience positive or negative mental health effects, and both are likely to manifest more in adolescent immigrants [7,14,17].…”

Mental health promotion as perceived by Norwegian adolescents with somatically ill parents – an interpretative phenomenological analysis

“…This finding is understood in light of Antonovsky’s model of health ( 1987 ), in which peers seem to contain features that make them become a GRR for the participants. We assess peers as becoming a resource to counteract some of the stressors that accompany the situation with an SIP (Mittelmark et al, 2017 ; Mjøsund & Eriksson, 2021 ).…”

“…Consequently, it is important to increase the understanding of how their resources can be supported to strengthen their mental health. To ensure and promote mental health often seems to be characterised by distinct processes from those understood as the risks for mental illness (Mjøsund & Eriksson, 2021 ). In the present study, we applied a salutogenic perspective on mental health (Antonovsky, 1987 ; Keyes, 2002 ) to gain insights into mental health-promoting experiences from the inside perspective of adolescents.…”

“…Mental health promotion includes the strategies to promote, protect and restore mental health (WHO, 2022 ). In clinical practice, health professionals are encouraged to apply more holistic care based on knowledge from both the paradigms of salutogenesis and pathogenesis (Mjøsund & Eriksson, 2021 ).…”