Research Paper on:
Alternatives in Psychiatric Nursing

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
or intervention; well also look briefly at some of the issues surrounding this field. The paper contains a literature review. Literature Review Well begin with a German survey that  was conducted to determine how many psychiatric inpatients contact providers of alternative therapies (Demling et al, 2002). The researchers wanted to examine what sort of therapies and diagnostic methods  the CAM providers use, how competent the patients who see these practitioners judge them to be, how they feel about alternative therapies in general and how satisfied they are with  the alternative treatments theyve experienced (Demling et al, 2002). The researchers developed a questionnaire that they had 473 psychiatric patients fill out; the patients had been admitted to a psychiatric  hospital during a 9-month period (Demling at el, 2002). They found that approximately one-third of the patients had contacted an alternative therapies practitioner, and of this third, one-quarter had  contacted the practitioner in regard to their current mental illness (Demling et al, 2002). Women made up the majority of those who sought CAM, and people with lower educational  levels used CAM more often than those with higher educational attainment (Demling at al, 2002). People who sought alternative methods expressed a high degree of loyalty towards the practitioners  they visited, and some tended to visit fairly frequently (Demling et al, 2002). Patients in general were very positive about their experience with CAM, even when the same treatments  were used for both mental illness and physical complaints (Demling et al, 2002). Women were generally more satisfied than men, and those who visited the practitioners frequently were on  the whole happier with them than those who only saw them occasionally (Demling et al, 2002). Based on their research, Demling and his colleagues concluded that "psychiatric patients seek out