The relationship of mental health with resilience among psychiatric nurses

Psychiatric wards are stressful environments. Resilience can help psychiatric nurses cope with their occupational stress. The aim of the study was to examine the relationship of mental health with resilience among psychiatric nurses. This cross-sectional descriptive-correlational study was conducted in 2017 on a sample of sixty nurses purposively recruited from all wards of Qods psychiatric hospital, Sanandaj, Iran. Study data were collected using a demographic questionnaire, the 28-item General Health Questionnaire, and the 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. The data were analyzed via the SPSS software v. 16.0 through conducting the independent-sample t test, the one-way analysis of variance, and the multiple linear regression analysis. The level of significance was set at less than 0.05. In total, sixty psychiatric nurses (34 males and 26 females) with a mean age of 33.23±5.45 participated in this study. The mean scores of their mental health and resilience were 57.35±11.12 and 63.9±14.05, respectively. Resilience had significant relationships with age (0.025), marital status (P = 0.013), and work shift (P = 0.005). Moreover, among the subscales of mental health, only the mean score of the anxiety and insomnia subscale had significant relationship with resilience, so that each one point increase in the mean score of this subscale was associated with a 1.029-point increase in the mean score of resilience (P = 0.036). Psychiatric nurses’ resilience can be promoted through managing their stress and promoting their mental health.