Investigation of the relationship between personality, mercury, and empathy in nurses working in psychiatric services

INTRODUCTION AND AIM: Compassion fatigue is a concept expressed as physical, emotional, spiritual and social exhaustion that affects the individual, causing a decrease in the caregiver's ability to empathize with others, the desire to give care, his ability and energy. In our study, it was aimed to determine the personality, compassion fatigue and empathy levels in psychiatric nurses and to evaluate the relationship between them. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 150 psychiatric nurses working in hospitals with psychiatry clinics in Istanbul between 15/11/2018 and 30/08/2019 were included in the study. The data were collected using the Interview Form, Adjective Based Personality Test, Compassion Fatigue Scale and Empathic Tendency Scale. The data were evaluated using the Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis and Pearson correlation tests. FINDINGS: In the study, significant relationships were found between the Adjective Based Personality Test of psychiatric nurses and the total and sub-dimension scores of the Compassion Fatigue Scale. Significant relationships were found between the Adjective Based Personality Test and the total and sub-dimension scores of the Empathic Tendency Scale. A significant relationship was found between the Compassion Fatigue sub-dimensions and total score and Empathic Tendency. CONCLUSION: We can say that the psychiatric nurses participating in our study experienced compassion fatigue, personality traits and empathy skills affected compassion fatigue, and compassion fatigue increased as empathic tendency increased. These results are important for planning interventions to improve compassion fatigue of psychiatric nurses. Key words: Compassion, Personality, Empathy, Nurse, Fatigue.