Meanings of Mental Health in Nursing Students

Introduction: The meanings are constructed from culture and according to them individuals carry out their actions in the world, being mental health one of the fields of action of nursing professionals, it is essential to address these meanings in nursing students that according to these will provide mental health care to the individual, family and communities. Objective: To understand the meanings in mental health that nursing students of a Colombian University have. Methodology: qualitative study, with an ethnographic approach, with information gathering techniques such as semi-structured interviews, observations recorded in the field diary, the analysis was qualitative of ethnographic type based on the dense description posed by Cliffort Geertz. Results: Interviews with 11 nursing students, recorded and transcribed, under descriptive, axial and selective coding process, with saturation of categories, thus ceasing the field work, the dense description is obtained obtaining findings such as those that raise the current article of Mental Health meanings from the individual-behavioral, social and biological, from the psychiatric, mental and from a positive and healthy perspective. Conclusion: positive mental health is present in the meanings that nursing students give to mental health.