Suicide Rates - Report Example

Introduction

The rates of suicide resulting from different reasons, most of which are linked to imbalanced mental health, need to be reduced so that society can get the opportunity to address the different issues that affect them and contribute to their increased possibilities of committing suicide. When suicide rates, society is bound to enjoy the benefits of the different talents it would have lost to preventable deaths. Therefore, suicide prevention will increase society's productivity (Healthy People, 2020). Finally, suicide prevention and the reduction of suicide rates will lead to better mental health for society. Increased suicide rates hurt the people in society, whereby they may experience mental health issues, which may lead them to contemplate suicide as an option from their mental health issues. Additionally, when a suicide occurs in society, it becomes normalized as a way out of the issues that one experiences. Therefore, this results in an increased preference for suicide to deal with the mental health issues that one faces.

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Proportion of Primary Care Facilities

The majority of the primary care facilities only offer treatment services for physical ailments and complications. They rely on the few facilities that offer mental health treatment to the patients. This reality has resulted in people in the society suffering from early detection and enough facilities to help them manage their conditions, which results in the patients' conditions being deteriorated by the time they are being diagnosed, hence making it hard to treat and manage them (Healthy People, 2020). Therefore, the number of primary care facilities that provide treatment for mental health issues should be increased to receive mental health diagnosis, intervention, and management. If the facilities are unable to, they will pay for the referrals they will make to the facilities to handle the cases.

How Nurses Can Help the Society

The therapeutic connection and direct relationship between nurses and patients put them at a point to detect the possibility of the patients being at risk of committing suicide. Through their training, nurses can create relationships with their patients, which will allow them to pick on cues that may point towards the possibility of the patients they are handling being at the risk of committing suicide, thereby creating patient-level intervention (Bolster et al., 2015). This being so, nurses are expected to be attentive to the slightest clues and cues that may come from their patients concerning the possibility of committing suicide or their mental health being compromised, hence putting them at risk. Nurses must recognize that suicide is not a decision arrived at instantaneously, but rather a process that follows a continuum of thoughts and practices that lead to the final committed action. Therefore, the nurses must apply their observational qualities to help them pick up the slightest clues on the mental health of the patients being compromised and using the relationship established between them and their patients to provide immediate psychosocial support and refer the patients to specialists who will offer more help to the issues that they face.

The nurses can also undertake system-level interventions, which are mainly concerned with providing the patients with safe and holistic environments, which will reduce the possibility of the patients having suicidal thoughts. Some of the aspects associated with system-level interventions include establishing safe environments in the facilities, both physical and mental, to have the serenity required to enjoy reduced possibilities of attempting suicide (Bolster et al., 2015). The system-level interventions also include developing policies that will be applied in the facilities and the society as a whole, which will reduce suicide rates. Finally, the nurses can help promote mental health treatment and reduce suicide rates by undertaking training to gain knowledge on training on the issue, resulting in improved outcomes from the interventions undertaken.

Mental and Physical Health

While there is a known link between mental and physical health conditions, the link's effects are felt more when there are chronic physical conditions involved. The existence of poor mental health conditions puts the patients concerned at experiencing chronic physical conditions. Migraines, which are persistent headaches that take significantly longer and are more painful than the normal headaches, are chronic conditions, which may result from overthinking due to mental illnesses such as stress and anxiety (Ohrnberger et al., 2017). In some instances, the patients may suffer from chronic stomach ulcers, resulting in discomfort, pain, and even more mental conditions due to worrying over the chronic conditions. Poor physical health may mean the development of poor mental health. When one is consistently sick, either from chronic or other diseases and complications, they are in a state of worry and anxiety over their well-being, resulting in severe mental health issues. The financial burden that comes with the treatment of chronic diseases and the negative effects that the diseases have on the patients' social relationships may result in negative mental health outcomes, which may mean that they will develop serious mental health complications by being physically unwell.

There are social determinants of health that affect an individual's mentality, hence resulting in the physical health being determined. Some determinants, such as the attitudes held by society towards activities such as alcohol intake and diets, may result in the people's physical health concerned being affected (Ohrnberger et al., 2017). Mental health is impacted by the societies around the people concerned and what are considered norms and acceptable behaviors. When the society has accepted some behaviors, the people concerned will likely engage in them, and if the behaviors result in negative impacts on health, then the people concerned will experience ill physical health, while if the behaviors promote positive health outcomes, then the people concerned will experience positive physical health outcomes.

Trauma Informed Care

Trauma-Informed Care is an approach undertaken by professionals in human services that assumes that everyone is likelier to have experienced trauma in their lives than not having experienced it. The practice understands the nature of trauma and how it affects the people concerned and therefore looks to provide them with conducive environments from which they can overcome the trauma they underwent and develop resilience against the trauma that they may experience in the future (Purkey et al., 2018). Trauma-Informed Care concentrates more on the creation of conducive environment s for the healing of trauma to occur, instead of concentrating on practices or services which would help in overcoming trauma since they can act differently from how they were supposed to and end up retraumatizing the patients instead of offering them with working solutions.

Trauma-informed care can be applied to the cases where the patients are children and have been affected by trauma. Given that children in society are likely to experience traumatic experiences, there is a need for trauma-informed care to be applied whenever dealing with children in different settings. TIC helps the concerned parties in children’s wellbeing to effectively recognize children with trauma and effectively respond to them (Purkey et al., 2018). The promotion of a common language is also achieved through TIC, and therefore this means that the attempts by people in one community will be equally applied in different locations.

Conclusion

Therefore, this means that the creation of positive environments by caregivers will help improve the mental health outcomes of the children concerned. Therefore, when children are put in wholesome environments, they are likelier to get positive outcomes from their environments than if they are put through treatment in the environments.

References

Bolster, C., Holliday, C., Oneal, G., & Shaw, M. (2015). Suicide assessment and nurses: what does the evidence show. Online journal of issues in nursing, 20(2). https://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-20-2015/No1-Jan-2015/Suicide-Assessment-and-Nurses.html

Healthy People. (, 2020). Mental health and mental disorders | Healthy people 2020. Healthy People 2030 | health.gov.
https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/mental-health-and-mental-disorders/objectives

Ohrnberger, J., Fichera, E., & Sutton, M. (2017). The relationship between physical and mental health: A mediation analysis. Social Science & Medicine, 195, 42-49. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617306639

Purkey, E., Patel, R., & Phillips, S. P. (2018). Trauma-informed care: better care for everyone. Canadian Family Physician, 64(3), 170.
https://www.cfp.ca/content/cfp/64/3/170.full.pdf.