Educational strategies for mental health nursing of mental disorders from the perspective of cultural communication

Abstract Background In the system of preventing and treating mental illnesses, nursing staff not only undertake clinical care tasks, but also play an important role in disseminating knowledge and attitudes towards mental health. However, existing mental health nursing education focuses on biomedical models and operational skills training, with insufficient attention to cultural context differences and stigmatization issues related to mental illness, which limits the practical effectiveness of nursing staff in communication, education, and support guidance. Therefore, it is necessary to reconstruct the strategy of mental health nursing education from the perspective of cultural dissemination, in order to improve the quality of nursing communication, reduce stigmatized cognition, and enhance patients' sense of psychological security. Methods The study adopted a pre - and post experimental control design, selecting on duty nurses from a tertiary psychiatric hospital and a comprehensive hospital's psychiatric department as the subjects, all of whom have one year or more clinical experience and voluntarily participate. The intervention plan is designed based on cultural communication theory and lasts for 12 weeks, covering modules on disease cultural cognition, narrative communication, de stigmatization communication, and family community health education. It is implemented through a combination of lectures, case studies, and scenario simulations. The study conducted measurements before and after intervention, with evaluation indicators including nursing staff's mental health knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and nursing communication skills, as well as patient reported nursing experiences. Paired sample t-test was used to compare the changes in various indicators before and after intervention, with a statistical significance level set at p.05. Results The results showed that after the cultural dissemination oriented psychological health nursing education intervention, all quantitative indicators were significantly improved compared to before the intervention. The mental health knowledge level, cultural sensitivity, and nursing communication skills scores of nursing staff were significantly higher than baseline levels after intervention, and the differences were highly statistically significant (p.001), indicating that this education model has a significant effect on improving nursing staff's professional cognition and communication skills. At the same time, the nursing experience score of patients significantly improved after intervention, indicating that the improvement of nursing staff's education and cultural dissemination ability can directly improve patients' feelings and psychological experience, confirming the practical effectiveness of this educational intervention. Discussion Research indicates that integrating cultural communication into mental health nursing education addresses socio-cultural gaps in traditional training by enhancing nurses’ understanding of the cultural context of mental illness and improving nursing interactions and patient experiences. A culture oriented nursing education model can expand the role of nurses in mental health services and support the stigmatization of mental illness and public communication.