The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and psychiatric nursing specialty

INTRODUCTION: The fact that distance education has been switched to with the pandemic and physical limitation measures have affected the thesis processes in postgraduate education. It is important for mental health and psychiatric nurses, who have roles in protecting and improving community mental health, to adapt to the developments and changes brought about by the pandemic in terms of crisis management and the long-term effects of the pandemic. Postgraduate dissertations for nursing care based on scientific results constitute important evidence. In the research, the adaptation of mental health and psychiatric nursing postgraduate dissertations to the special conditions of the pandemic was examined. The type of research, data collection methods, interventions, and the reflections of the pandemic on the dissertation topic were evaluated.
METHODS: In the descriptive type of research, the postgraduate dissertations were scanned on September 05, 2022, at the Council of Higher Education Thesis Center using the document review method. A total of 107 dissertations completed between 2020 and 2022 in the departments of Mental Health and Diseases Nursing, Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing, Psychiatric Nursing, permission to publish theses in the database, approved were examined, 62 disserta-tions that met the inclusion criteria were included in the research.
RESULTS: Five of the dissertations included in the research are doctoral dissertations. It was determined that 75.8% of the dissertations were descriptive, descriptive-cross-sectional, and descriptive-relational types, 51.6% of the data were obtained by face-to-face interview, and 27.4% of the sample group were nurses and health workers. It has been determined that research has been conducted with patients who are diagnosed with coronavirus disease -19 and nursing nurses.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: It has been determined that descriptive, descriptive-cross-sectional, and descriptive-relational type of research is intensive in master’s degree dissertations, and this situation was similar before the pandemic. In experimental and semi-experimental dissertations, distance and hybrid intervention programs have shown the importance of telepsychiatry/tele mental health applications. It has been determined that the data are often obtained face-to-face, distance and hybrid methods are used in intervention programs, and the pandemic is included in the dissertations topics.