“Mental health nurses were quite involved then, and there was a lot of work done by nurses when those with mental health problems went back into the community,” said Hanrahan, the Dr. Lenore H. Kurlowicz Term Assistant Professor of Nursing.  Hanrahan’s research concentrates on how to use nurses to better care for mental-health patients – extending also into their physical health – especially when they leave the hospital setting.

“We are facing major problems,” said Hanrahan.  “These people have cardiac disease, metabolic syndromes, obesity, diabetes -- mainly because of lack of attention to their health care.  One of the reasons, I believe nurses have been phased out, is they cost more than other providers, and that can make for tragedies for many mental-health patients.”

Hanrahan believes the dominance of managed care has shunted mental health aside a bit.  It is not, she said, deemed as important as physical health, yet as many as 20 percent of American adults have some sort of mental illness.  Two-thirds of those diagnosed with mental illness never even get treated, she said.

She also said the population of psychiatric nurses is aging – it is up to 51 years of age – and that those who are retiring are not being replaced rapidly enough.  Some of her research is to try to help recruit more nurses who want to work in the field.

“I am optimistic, because people who go into nursing want challenges, and psychiatric nursing is, indeed, a challenge,” said Hanrahan, but her goal is to make the managed care system more aware of the crisis in mental-health care.  “If we can show the value added by nurses is worth the cost, then this would be an intervention that would be beneficial overall.”