FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD BECOME A PSYCH NURSE! | Reasons for behavioral/mental health nurse |

00:07 Reason Number 1: Opportunity to gain perspective on your own life
01:28 Reason Number 2: Compassion for others
02:40 Reason Number 3: You enjoy connecting with your patients
03:25 Reason Number 4: The pay
04:55 Reason Number 5: You enjoy the gray area of life
06:50 Reiteration of Reasons
07:18 Reason Number 6: It's easy.

Here are my top five reasons YOU should become a psyche nurse, these are in no particular order.

Reason number 1. As a psych nurse, you will have the opportunity to will gain perspective on your own life. You will learn to appreciate your own sanity much more than you ever thought imaginable. Real mental illness--I mean the stuff you read about in books, the stuff you see in movies, you will see all of that as a psych nurse. It’s fascinating, it’s curious, it’s tragic, it’s sad, it’s entertaining, it’s overwhelming and you’ll witness it every time you go to work. Even today after interacting w/ hundreds of patients, I often wonder, ‘man, what is this dude’s reality really like?’ So if you are the philosophical type, and you enjoy questioning reality and its constraints and you want to dabble in alternative realities vicariously thru a conversation you’re having w/ a patient--not only are you offering that deep and therapeutic connection so important and so absent in that patient’s life, but you’re also getting a chance to peek inside a reality no one else has really seen except for the patient. Think about that for a second. Thru conversation, you can have a glimpse into another person’s vastly different world while also forming a very important bond w/ another person, and get paid for it. That’s pretty cool.
Reason number 2 you should become a psych nurse is if you have genuine compassion for others and you like putting yourself in other people’s shoes. If this is you, we need you. Psych desperately needs compassionate individuals. A lot of our patients receive very minimal if any compassion from people and this pattern has been happening most of their lives, sometimes all the way back to childhood. Imagine how it must feel to feel so alone, to feel as though no one understands you, and then here comes this psych nurse, someone who listens attentively, someone who tries to understand your seemingly incomprehensible situation, someone who is able to withhold their judgment about you as a human being and just be there for you. If this is you, please, please become a psych nurse.
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Reason number 3 you should become a psych nurse is if you like connecting w/ your patients. A lot of nurses working in health care right now are so busy, especially on the medical side, they have to spend a lot of their time charting, or reviewing orders, or coordinating care, or calling doctors, or whatever and I have a number of friends who work as nurses in busy hospitals and they tell me all the time they wish they had more time to spend w/ their patients. Fortunately in psych, you usually have a lot of time to meet with your patients and really get to know them. So if you enjoy hanging out with your patients on the bedside, and having a casual conversation, psych nursing might just be for you.
Reason number 4. Psych nurses get paid really well. When I was a brand new grad, my job paid 37 dollars an hour. It was crazy. It was way more than I was expecting, and when I asked my buddies how much they were getting paid, they all were getting paid between twenty seven and thirty dollars an hour, and some of them were even working nights, and a lot of them were feeling overwhelmingly stressed. At my job, there was minimal stress, and had I worked the night shift, I would have been making something like forty four dollars an hour. Guys for me that’s crazy money. It’s more money than I’ve ever made and it was right after graduation. It’s absurd. And, at my last job, I could have worked as much overtime as I wanted. If I wanted to bust out 5 twelves in a row, 7 twelves in a row, have no life, be a derelict husband and father, I could have and then my overtime rate would have been around 60 an hour. That’s a lot of money. Of course anytime you’re working a lot of overtime you kind of pay for it in other ways, but still, i mean if my family and i were financially destitute, i had the option of working as many hours as I needed to and I know this is true of a lot of psych hospitals, they are desperate for staff so often time the overtime is there.
Reason Number 5. You enjoy the gray area of life. Alright so what is the gray area of life? If you’re coming from the medical side, there’s not a whole lot of gray. Things are pretty black and white. You got an infection? Take this antibiotic for a week. Diabetic? Take 20 units of insulin.