Pros
You get a paycheck and PTO builds pretty quickly.
Cons
I took a significant pay cut from my previous job. Management is good for deflecting the concerns of the unit/floor staff. You'll feel as though you're not being listened to. The first shift nurses genuinely believe they are superior to the second shift nurses and therefore treat them poorly. The units are small and dangerous. They don't care about acuity or safety of staff- it's only about filling beds. Until there's at least 18 patients on a unit, the unit is run by just one nurse and 1 to 2 unskilled laborers. Staff are legitimately defenseless. Restraint free facility that admits aggressive, sometimes outright violent patients. Staff can only employ "CPI" which are a couple of holds designed to be gentle on the patient who is attacking the staff, and then the 11-page packet and camera review policy makes it feel like you're being punished for resorting to defending yourself. Paper trailing here is insane. Serious overdocumentation. If the mental health techs complain that the nurses hide behind the desk and don't even interact with the patients, it's because the nurses are required to write a full biography on each of our acute patients on a daily basis. Management wants staff to be more individualized in patient treatment plans, but the facility itself mixes depression, alcohol withdraw, opiate withdraw, intermittent explosive disorder, bipolar mania, psychosis and schizophrenia altogether on one unit. High turnover rate due to all of the above.