*Corresponding author: Elpidoforos S Soteriades, United Arab Emirates Uni- versity, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health, Al Ain, UAE, Tel: + 971 037137586; Email: esoteria@uaeu.ac.ae Citation: Panayiotou EA, Economidou SC, Kaitelidou D, Soteriades ES (2019) Workplace Harassment and Depression in Mental Health Nurses: A National Survey from Cyprus. J Community Med Public Health Care 6: 047. Received: February 28, 2019; Accepted: March 20, 2019; Published: March 27, 2019 Copyright: © 2019 Panayiotou EA, et al. This is an open-access article dis- tributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction Workplace harassment or mobbing was defned for the frst time in the 1980’s by Heinz Leymann as “a type of psychological terror that arises in the form of systematic, directed, unethical communi- cation and antagonistic behavior by one or more individuals towards one individual” [1]. These actions take place often (almost every day) and over a long period of time (at least for six months) and, because of such a frequency and duration, it results in considerable psychic, psychosomatic and social misery [2]. Similarly to Leymann, several researchers such as Ege et al., Zapf et al., and Einarsen et al., char- acterize the concept of harassment in the workplace with the term mobbing [3-5]. Furthermore, bullying in the workplace has been char- acterized as a gradual, often invisible and an intensely individualized and harmful experience [6]. Over recent decades, several large-scale studies across a range of industry sectors have identifed the presence of workplace harassment and its damaging effects on individual employees and organizations alike [7-10]. In all felds of work, as well as in the healthcare sector there have been studies reporting on the presence of workplace harassment and/ or mobbing. The health services sector is classifed as one of the work areas with the highest prevalence of workplace harassment, reaching up to 9% [11]. In particular, workplace mobbing or bullying is a signifcant problem confronting the nursing profession. According to research reports, nurses are at greater risk of being exposed to work- place harassment compared to other health care professionals [12-15]. Harassment or mobbing is an international problem for nursing staff as demonstrated by different surveys conducted in Canada, [16] the United Kingdom, [17-20] the United States, [21-23] Australia, [15, 24-26] New Zealand, [27] Italy, [28,29] Pakistan, [30] Taiwan, Panayiotou EA, et al., J Community Med Public Health Care 2019, 6: 047 DOI: 10.24966/CMPH-1978/100047 HSOA Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health Care Research Article Eleni A Panayiotou 1,2 , Sofa C Economidou 3 , Dafni Kaitelidou 2,4 and Elpidoforos S Soteriades 5,6 * 1 Ministry of Health, Mental Health Services, Nicosia, Cyprus 2 Open University of Cyprus, Healthcare Management Program, Nicosia, Cyprus 3 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Health Sciences, Greece 4 United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health, Al Ain, UAE 5 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Department of Environmen- tal Health, Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Epidemiology, Boston, MA, USA 6 United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health, Al Ain, UAE Workplace Harassment and Depression in Mental Health Nurses: A National Survey from Cyprus Abstract Background: Workplace harassment constitutes a signifcant occu- pational hazard in many industries including the healthcare sector. The aim of our study was to evaluate workplace harassment and explore its potential association with depressive symptoms among mental health nurses. Methodology: A national survey among mental health nurses was conducted in Cyprus using three international validated ques- tionnaires; namely the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror (LIPT), evaluating “mobbing” in the workplace, the Center for Epide- miological Studies in Depression (CES-D) Scale, and a specifcally designed, questionnaire for the collection of the demographic data of the participants. The data were analyzed with the statistical package SPSS 20. Results: Among 402 mental health nurses in Cyprus, 255 com- pleted the survey (response rate 62.9%) with a slight majority being women (55.7%). The prevalence of workplace harassment (mobbing) was 8.2%. In addition, about one in ten nurses (11.0%) reported depressive symptoms based on the CES-D scale. Using multi-variable adjusted logistic regression models (adjusted for age, gender, marital status, educational level, professional ranking, and years of experience), we found that mental health nurses who re- ported workplace harassment were 5.2 times more likely to have depressive symptoms compared to their colleagues who did not experience workplace harassment. Conclusion: Workplace harassment as well as depressive symp- tomatology is quite prevalent among mental health nurses in Cy- prus. Workplace harassment was also signifcantly associated with depressive symptoms among mental health nurses. Further qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the above association is warranted. Keywords: Cyprus; Depression; Mobbing; Nurses; Survey; Work- place harassment