DEVELOPMENT OF A STRESS SCALE FOR MENTAL-HEALTH PROFESSIONALS

This paper describes the development of the Mental Health Professional s Stress Scale (MHPSS): a self-report method of identifying sources of stress for mental health professionals. The 42-item scale, which incl udes seven subscales, was administered to 154 clinical psychologists a nd 111 mental health nurses. The MHPSS was found to have good internal consistency (alpha = .87 for clinical psychologists; alpha = .94 for mental health nurses). The preliminary evidence suggests that the conc urrent validity of the MHPSS is good. The expected relationships betwe en the scale and between the criterion measures-General Health Questio nnaire, a symptom check list, job satisfaction, self-reported stress l evel and quality of social support-were demonstrated. The results also provide evidence for the discriminant validity of the subscales to me asure different aspects of the stress experience. The MHPSS was shown to discriminate between two groups of health professionals who might b e expected to differ in their sources of stress. For clinical psycholo gists the most important source of stress was 'professional self-doubt ' whereas the major source of stress for mental health nurses was foun d to be the difficulty of handling potentially violent or difficult pa tients in the context of scarce staff resources. For both groups, howe ver, 'home-work conflict' was the subscale most strongly and consisten tly associated with mental health outcome. It is concluded that the pr eliminary evidence regarding the utility of the MHPSS is encouraging, although further data are clearly needed.