NCLEX Simplified: Autoimmune, Psych, and Herbs

Explore anxiety from mild to panic, detailing symptoms like sweating, dizziness, muscle tension, and urinary frequency, plus selective attention and comprehension challenges and medication and coping options.

Explore anxiety medications, including benzodiazepines with abuse risk and a retrograde amnesia drug used pre- and post-operatively, and examine phobia management with antidepressants and desensitisation options.

Examine anorexia nervosa and bulimia, covering fear of obesity, distorted body image, extreme weight loss, purging and binge eating, plus electrolyte imbalance and arrhythmia risks.

Explore obsessive compulsive disorder's anxiety-driven rituals and thoughts, and conversion disorder's real symptoms with psychiatric origins, highlighting diagnostic evaluations and exposure-based therapies like stimulus-response prevention.

Explore common defense mechanisms, including denial, displacement, dissociation, rationalization, regression, projection, symbolization, substitution, repression, and reaction formation, with examples.

Identify depression symptoms, monitor for suicide risk and warning cues, and understand treatment options from antidepressants to electroconvulsive therapy as a last-resort treatment.

Describe bipolar disorder with manic and depressive phases, including flight of ideas and grandiose delusions, and outline management with environmental simplification, rest, and lithium monitoring for toxicity.

Understand schizophrenia's features—delusions, hallucinations, mutism, waxy flexibility, and paranoid ideas—and apply calm communication, avoid arguing, verbalize observations, and use simple activities to boost self-esteem.

Compare older antipsychotics like chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and risperidone for schizophrenia, highlighting sedation, weight gain, extrapyramidal side effects, including parkinsonism, dystonia, tardive dyskinesia, and neuroleptic malignant syndrome, with benadryl and benztropine.

Identify withdrawal signs—tremors, diarrhea, rising vitals—stabilize with diazepam, note delirium tremens after cessation, consequences, and discuss disulfiram and alcohol avoidance.

Explore post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder, including trauma sources, memory disclosure, empathy, and coping strategies to reduce flashbacks.

Explore common personality disorders, including antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, dependent, avoidant, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and learn consistent nursing strategies like limit setting and non-arguing communication.

Learn how herbs affect bleeding risk and drug interactions, with cautions on dosage and FDA regulation, featuring ginkgo, ginseng, St. John's wort, garlic, ginger, and valerian.