What is a nurse psychotherapist?
Nurse psychotherapists are ACMHN Credentialed Mental Health Nurses or nurse practitioners who have graduate qualifications and/or substantial psychotherapeutic experience and training that equips them as psychotherapists. The common elements are theoretical learning, regular supervised clinical practice in psychotherapy, and the undertaking of personal psychotherapy, all integral parts of the process of becoming a psychotherapist. Nurse psychotherapists also adhere to the seven principles below to guide practice.
Nurse psychotherapists are prepared to work with those presenting with complex mental illness diagnoses, very often combined with distressing physiological, pharmaceutical, psychological, social, and family complexities. Due to the diverse and at times challenging formative experiences that mental health nursing provides its practitioners, nurse psychotherapists meet these challenges with perception, agility and abundant hope. This enables us to work with those whose hope for recovery has been exhausted by experiences of complex trauma and failed treatment attempts, as well as those with a range of less severe presentations.
Nurse psychotherapists are driven by a passion to help reduce the suffering of those experiencing mental illness, to humanise care, to treat people with dignity, to promote hope in recovery, to deliver focused psychological treatments, to advocate for social justice and to contribute to social and personal transformation and empowerment.
What is psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is a broad term including many ways of working with people holistically via talk, somatic interventions, movement, art, music, nature, neurofeedback, EMDR and more. The aim of psychotherapy is not just to reduce or eliminate symptoms, but to offer hope, repair attachment difficulties, empower the people we work with and help them to make adjustments over the lifespan, or work through troubling or stuck issues. Recovery and strength-oriented psychotherapy spans the simplest to the most complex situations and understands the therapeutic relationship to be essential.
Psychotherapy has always been a vital part of the MH nursing role. Nurse psychotherapists are motivated to self-reflect, to commit to ongoing learning and clinical supervision, and attend to their own healing through personal psychotherapy to help reduce the distress of those experiencing mental, physical, emotional, and relational suffering.