Self-Advocacy for Nurses with Mental Health Disabilities (1213 hits)
Self-Advocacy for Nurses with Mental Health Disabilities
Knowing your rights and options—and even more important, how to advocate for them—can help you break through the barriers on your path to career success.
Nurse practitioner George Copeland, MSN, NP-C, NRCME, is at the top of his profession. He’s been a nurse for 25 years, has earned advanced degrees and certifications, has his own family practice in southeast Florida, and teaches part-time at a community college.
Yet achieving a successful nursing career wasn’t always easy for Copeland, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1981. Like many new RN graduates, he started off working in the traditional hospital setting. But he quickly realized that he couldn’t handle the constant pressure of shift work.
“I tried, but I cannot work in that setting,” he explains. “I can’t take that particular kind of stress. Stress is the number one trigger for people with bipolar disorder. That’s why I went back to school to become a nurse practitioner so that I could work at my own pace and at what I wanted to do.”
“The Stigma Is Real”
It’s impossible to make generalizations about nurses and nursing students who are living with mental health disabilities, because the term encompasses such a broad range of conditions—including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and more.
But this often-unrecognized population of minority nurses does have one thing in common. All too frequently, they face formidable barriers on the path to career success in nursing, from self-doubt and stigma to bias and outright discrimination in education, licensing, and employment. That’s in spite of the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been the law of the land since 1990 and will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year.
“Nurses with mental health challenges are struggling, and the stigma is real,” says Donna Maheady, EdD, ARNP, founder and president of ExceptionalNurse.com, an online resource network for nurses and students with disabilities. “Often they are very hesitant to ask for accommodations [under the ADA], or to come out in public as needing help, because of the fear of potential discrimination. They’re scared silent.”
Researcher Leslie Neal-Boylan, PhD, RN, CRRN, APRN, FNP-BC, dean of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh College of Nursing and author of Nurses with Disabilities: Professional Issues and Job Retention, has documented ample evidence that disability-based discrimination is alive and well in the nursing profession.
“Many administrators don’t seem to understand that they’re really leaving themselves open to legal action,” she says. “The nurse develops a disability, or reveals it, and then the discrimination begins—the assumptions that these nurses can’t do the things they’re supposed to do, and that people will be uncomfortable around them.”
But even though a surprising number of nursing gatekeepers still seem to be clueless about their obligations under antidiscrimination laws, that doesn’t mean you have to be. If you’re a nurse or student with a mental health disability, your most effective success strategy is to actively be your own best advocate.
“It’s very important for nurses with any kind of disability to know their rights going in, rather than feeling vulnerable and being afraid to make waves,” says Karen McCulloh, BS, RN, co-founder and co-director of the National Organization of Nurses with Disabilities (NOND). “But not all of them do, and not all of them are good self-advocates.”
