Course Reflective Summary

Mental Health
Alysia Brillhart

This semester, we got to take a Mental Health course. At first, I was a little unsure about

this course because I really haven’t had the opportunity to care for mental health patients.

Where I work, we rarely see mental health patients on my unit so I was interested to learn

more about mental health concepts.

One thing that I enjoyed about Mental Health was that since we really didn’t get to have

mental health patients on the unit we were on, we did have the opportunity to go to

CommQuest and Compassionate Care during our clinical. For my CommQuest experience, I had

the opportunity to interview a patient for one hour and learned that she overdosed. It was

interesting to learn the importance of counseling, group therapy, medications and assessments

on patients in CommQuest. I learned that nurses use a tool called Clinical Opiate Withdrawal

System (COWS) to determine if a patient is experiencing mild, moderate or severe opiate

withdrawal. For my Compassionate Care experience, I got to learn about different roles of the

Compassionate Care Center and the importance of end of life care. It was interesting to learn

about the signs/symptoms patients may experience during end of life, the impact that dying has

on the patient’s family and how nurses can be a support system for both the patient and their

family.

When it comes to Mental Health lecture, my instructor did a great job providing us with

learning tools to help us gain knowledge regarding mental health diseases and treatments. I

personally enjoyed doing the weekly discussion boards because they helped me learn a lot

about the disease processes and treatments that are involved. I also felt that the quizzes helped
to prepare me for the midterm and final since there weren’t any other tests in the class.

Overall, I had a great experience in this class. I will definitely be able to use the

knowledge I learned in this class to be prepared to care for and talk therapeutically to mental

health patients. I also can say that I know more about the medications that mental health

patients receive and the importance of these patients adhering to their treatments.