Abstract
Mental health nurses, together with psychiatrists, are the healthcare professionals who display the highest levels of empathy and the best attitudes towards patients with mental disorders. However, burnout is a common problem among these professionals. The aim of our study is to describe the association between empathy, burnout, and attitudes towards patients with mental disorders among mental health nurses in Spain. A descriptive cross-sectional design was used involving a sample of 750 specialist nurses working in mental health facilities in Spain. An intentional, non-probability, non-discriminative, exponential snowball sampling method was used. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the Community Attitudes towards Mental Illness Inventory were used to measure the study variables. A positive correlation was observed between empathy and all the study variables, with the exception of the personal accomplishment dimension of burnout and the social restrictiveness and authoritarianism dimensions of attitudes towards mental illness, where a negative relation was observed. Our findings suggest that empathy is associated with an increase in positive attitudes towards patients with mental disorders, decreasing associated stigma, but did not act as a protective factor against burnout in the study sample.
Highlights
The stigma of mental illness is a reality in our society, especially among healthcare professionals [1,2]
Empathy is directly related to the age of the professionals, the years worked as an unspecialized nurse, and the years worked as a mental health nurse, these results being in line with the international literature [13,31,43]
The scientific literature describes empathy as a protective factor against burnout [43,44], in our study we found that higher empathy scores indicate higher levels of burnout
Summary
The stigma of mental illness is a reality in our society, especially among healthcare professionals [1,2]. Empathy among mental health nurses is a key element helping to reduce stigma towards patients with mental disorders [3]. Mental health nurses often experience the well-known burnout syndrome, which reduces the quality of their professional work [4]. An analysis of the associations between these variables may provide a better understanding of how they interact among mental health nurses working directly with patients with mental disorders in Spain. Empathy is a multidimensional construct [5] responsible for perceiving the experiences, concerns, and perspectives of another individual without losing reference to one’s own self [6]. Empathy may be modified by receiving training and through individual and work experience [7]
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