PSYC 110N Week 8 Discussion: Looking Ahead (GRADED)

PSYC 110N Week 8 Discussion: Looking Ahead Congratulations! You have graduated Chamberlain University and have been working as a nurse for one year. On your next shift, you are tasked with taking care of a 75-year-old woman who is suffering from dementia. She is under your care and has been recently diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Her family comes to visit her often and expresses to you that they are worried about her overall health and have been overly stressed making sure she gets the proper care she needs. The family has also stated that they believe the recent hospitalization is contributing to her stress. Answer the following questions based on the scenario described above: Discuss two to three major theories or concepts that you have learned throughout the course and apply them to the case. Creativity in application is encouraged! As a future nurse, how will having an understanding of psychological principles help you in the workplace, with patients and co-workers? Be sure to make connections between your ideas and conclusions and the research, concepts, terms, and theory we are discussing this week. Hello Everyone, Back in 2015, I had worked in a nursing home for about a year. The impression that staff makes on both the residents and their families is crucial in the success of treatment and the overall wellbeing of the residents. Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease is quite common within a nursing facility and needs to be treated with the upmost respect and patience. I found it to be quite challenging for most of the staff to understand how these illnesses work and how quickly they can progress. Patients can go in all sorts of directions with these illnesses and no one can truly predict how these residents will psychologically, physically, and emotionally handle these changes. For example, I had some patients that were aggressive, depressed, happy, emotionless, or excited. It all depended on the resident. Sussex Publishers (2021) defines dementia as an umbrella term that refers to age-related cognitive deterioration caused by a variety of factors and a range of symptoms. By taking this into consideration, you can see how the 75-year-old woman can be also diagnosed with depression. The variety of factors and symptoms can lead patients to become diagnosed with a variety of diagnoses. Again, it all depends on that patient. Anything can trigger patients and their emotions. It can lead them to fall into a deep depression or have them loose all sense of who they are all together. Anxiety is another common diagnosis within patients that have dementia. Furthermore, the three major concepts that grasped the majority of my interest throughout this session were the perspectives: cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, and neuroscience. The scenario that pertained to the 75-year-old woman could be related to almost all of them. Specifically, neuroscience, cognitive perspective, or the humanistic perspective would play a huge part towards her treatment. The neuroscience would contribute towards genetics and evolution, particularly on the brain and the nervous system to figure out what her best approach would be. Free will and freely making decisions would be the humanistic perspective towards treatment. Finally, the cognitive perspective would pertain to perception, memory, conceptual representations, and organizing both internal and external environments that would be particularly beneficial for her treatment (Feldman, 2019). Feldman (2019) explains psychological principles between learning and cognition, motivation, social, emotional, context, and assessment. As a future nurse, I will be able to use the psychological principles that was learned throughout this session in my workplace, with patients, and co-workers. These will be applied through each principle and allow me to be able to represent Chamberlain and what I have learned throughout this session in the future. It will allow me to provide a higher level of patience and understanding towards my patients and better myself as a nurse all around. By doing so, I can be an example towards my co-workers and show them what I have learned. Hopefully, by my example they can better themselves as well and provide the care each patient seeks and deserves. The 75-year-old woman seeks care and affection and from reading that the family believes that the hospitalization is contributing to her stress makes a lot of sense. Most hospitals do not have the patience to handle patients with her illness. They look forward to sending them off to either a rehabilitation center or a nursing home. This is because the care that these individuals need is time consuming and most likely, the woman was not receiving the proper care. If we all take this into consideration for our future as nurses, trust me, we will make a difference in that patient’s life. Just a quick comment, I wish the best of luck to all of you for the future sessions! Also, looking forward into meeting you all too! Thank you, Dominique Sanchez References: Feldman, R. S. (2019). Understanding psychology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. Sussex Publishers. (2021). Dementia. Psychology Today.