Hope and interpersonal psychiatric/mental health nursing: a systematic review of the literature--part one.

Psychiatric/mental health (P/MH) nursing is inherently an interpersonal endeavour; one that includes a broad range of 'helping activities'. The interpersonal activities and skills are enshrined in our underpinning philosophy, explored and learned in our curricula (all around the world) and enacted in our everyday clinical practice. Within this interpersonal context and framework, it is heartening to see that understated, abstract and yet-lasting concepts such as hope are gaining more acknowledgement, recognition and subsequently attention. While it is recognized that hope in mental health care is increasingly becoming the focal point of disciplined inquiry, the authors believe it is perhaps necessary and timely to re-examine these two concepts, namely: interpersonal P/MH nursing and hope/inspiring hope in people with mental health problems. Accordingly, this two-part article reports on a systematic review of the literature that focuses on hope (inspiring hope) within interpersonal (counselling) focused P/MH nursing. Part one focuses on the method used and the results, indicating that a total of 57 articles were included in the review: 39 were categorized as empirical studies involving either a quantitative or qualitative methodological design, and 18 were considered theoretical/clinical/review articles. Though not a product of an empirical investigation per se, it was clear that many of the articles shared and covered common ground. Thus, these were arranged into six 'loose' thematic groupings. The first three of these areas, schizophrenia, suicidality and depression form the remainder of part one of this article, and the remaining areas are included in part two.

Hope and interpersonal psychiatric/mental health nursing: a systematic review of the literature--part two.

This is the second of a two-part article which reports on a systematic review of the literature that focuses on hope (inspiring hope) within interpersonal (counselling) focused psychiatric/mental health (P/MH) nursing. Part one focused on the first three substantive areas, whereas this article focuses on the remaining areas and the discussion points arising out of the review. The discussion points arising are: (1) despite the increasing attention to hope over the last three decades, there remains a distinct paucity of research pertaining to P/MH nurses and hope, hoping and hopelessness; (2) the research that has been undertaken thus far lacks a cumulative, sequential progressive focus and has more of a sporadic, disparate look to it; (3) there is a dearth of empirical work to underpin specific interventions; (4) this relative absence of empirical work means that P/MH nurses often have to look to allied and/or related disciplines for their hope-related research; (5) there appears to be a disparity between the alleged importance of hope and the subsequent research activity; and (6) the research that does exist across different substantive areas appears to indicate that there might be common or shared basic psychosocial processes of hope inspiration, and thus the probability of a formal grounded theory; and this allows for idiosyncratic psychosocial processes for each substantive area. As a result of this review, the authors tentatively suggest that the inspiration of hope in P/MH nursing is grounded in the relationship established between nurse and person in need of hope, an emerging empirical finding that has obvious congruence and synchronicity with the philosophy and theory of a Peplauvian-based approach to P/MH nursing.