title: Nursing's contribution to social psychiatry: a holistic approach to personhood.
abstract: The expanded role of the nurse in social psychiatry involves building upon the conventional role of the nurse to include a focus on health promotion and prevention as well as on the detection and treatment of illness. Nursing is strategically located and uniquely prepared to take on such a challenge. Nursing has long recognized the holistic nature of families and communities. Nursing assumes that families have rights and responsibilities which include participation in the solution to problems which they helped to create. Nursing has been sensitive to the interrelationship between social expectation and dysfunctional behaviour. In the expanded role, nurses have accepted the mandate to transform society, to act as social change agents, as family advocates, as champions of minorities and as facilitators of mental health, i.e., the promotion and maintenance of mental health as well as disease detection and restoration of health. With a focus on mental health teaching, mental health promotion and prevention, nursing has the potential for providing an essential, holistic, now missing, link in the delivery of mental health services.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003158:Community Psychiatry; D006801:Humans; D009722:Nurse Practitioners; D010687:Philosophy, Nursing; D011568:Psychiatric Nursing