The meaning of depression: Swedish nurses’ perceptions of depressed inpatients

Abstract

People suffering from depressive disorder are affected by one of the western world’s largest medical groups of disorders in both psychiatric and general medicine. Drug treatment is usually the first‐line intervention and has been shown to be an effective treatment. Other therapies, including nursing interventions that could be implemented in care, are infrequently used. It is therefore important to understand whether nurses’ perceptions of depressed people could be explained from the medical model by defining the nurses’ view of psychiatric inpatients. Therefore, the aim of this study was, with the clinical picture as the starting point, to investigate the nurses’ view of hospitalized patients with a diagnosis of depression. In this prospective study, 155 nurses’ opinion of depression among depressive inpatients was assessed using a questionnaire based on the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale. To elucidate the relationship between the variables in the questionnaire, factor analysis rotated by the Varimax method with Kaiser’s normalization was used. The factor analysis identified five factors. The number of variables was reduced from 61 to 34. Based on the factor interpretation, an initial factor structure for the depressive inpatient was defined. The identified factors were interpreted and labelled to create the nurses’ fused ‘picture’ or meaning of the depressed inpatient as an individual who experienced feelings of annihilation, alienation, fatigue, emptiness and affliction, an individual who is disconnected from the whole of temporality.

Former patients' experience of psychiatric care: A qualitative investigation

“…Findings showed that nurses had a strong tendency to use typologies in relation to the patients, leading to distanced relationships and to their not seeing patients as unique individuals (Lilja et al . 2004), as well as their having a strongly medical approach towards their patients (Lilja et al . 2006).…”

When expressions make impressions—Nurses’ narratives about meeting severely ill patients in home nursing care: A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to understanding

“…They have patients they like and patients they dislike or experience as onerous ( cf . Hellzén & Asplund, 2006; Lilja, Hellzèn, & Hellzèn, 2006). The nurses talked quite freely and honestly about meetings, which brought about this kind of negative emotions.…”

Disconfirmed in one's otherness: A comparison between the nurse's view of the patient's past, present and future and the patient's own view of the past, present and future

“…The results of two earlier studies (Lilja et al, 2004(Lilja et al, , 2006 indicated that in order to reach a deep enough understanding of the nurses' attitude, a new research strategy was needed. Consequently, a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach was used (Lindseth & Norberg, 2004) with the narrative picturing technique (Stuhlmiller, 1994) as a way of bringing to conscious awareness memories the body has stored.…”

“…Earlier in this project, nurses' attitudes have been described from a quantitative point of view. Findings showed that nurses had a strong tendency to use typologies in relation to the patients, leading to a distanced relationship and to their not seeing the patient as an unique person (Lilja, Ö rdell, Dahl, & Hellzén, 2004), and their having a strongly medical approach to their patients (Lilja, Hellzén, Lind, & Hellzén, 2006). To increase our understanding it is important to go further in our studies about attitudes and try to determine whether there is harmony or a discrepancy between nurses' and patients' view of the patient's former life, hospital stay and caring goals.…”