By Adam J. Wickett, BSN, RN

We have spent years talking about what is wrong with nursing culture. “Nurses eat their young.” New nurses leave too soon. Burnout is everywhere. Tension on the floor feels almost expected. We have named it. We have seen it. Most of us have lived it.

But naming it hasn’t fixed it. If anything, the conversation keeps circling the same territory without getting any closer to the root of it. And I think that is because this goes deeper than behavior. Somewhere along the way, we stopped working as a unified profession, and we have been navigating the fallout ever since.

Nursing is supposed to be team-based. It has to be. The work is too complex, too demanding, too unpredictable for anything else to really work. And yet in practice, we often operate in silos.

You see it in small moments. A new nurse hesitating to ask a question because she does not want to be judged. An experienced nurse holding back help, sometimes out of frustration, sometimes simply out of exhaustion. Tension between shifts or units that never gets addressed and eventually just becomes wallpaper. And then there is the quiet mindset of “that is not my patient” showing up more often than it should.

I watched something like this play out recently. Two nurses were going back and forth over who would cover the med room assignment for the night. One of them typically avoids that role and takes charge instead. The other is usually willing to do either, but he had worked several long shifts in a row and had reached his limit and wanted a break for the night. I wasn’t in a position to step in, but it was uncomfortable to watch.

The conversation escalated. At one point, one of them said, “Then I don’t really want to work with you tonight.”

The assignment got covered. But the tension didn’t go anywhere. It just settled in and stayed for the rest of the shift. It wasn’t really about the med room. It was about accumulated fatigue, patterns that had built up over time, and a system that leaves almost no room for flexibility.

A colleague who recently moved from days to nights told me about her old unit and how patients were divided strictly by assignment, how nurses focused only on their own group even when another patient needed something simple and their assigned nurse was unavailable. It wasn’t neglect. Nobody had bad intentions. It was just how things had evolved over time. But in psychiatric care, even small interactions carry weight. A brief check-in, an acknowledgment, those things maintain rapport. When they don’t happen, patients notice. And in an environment where stability is already fragile, rapport can be everything.

Nights are different. Fewer staff means you have to rely on each other more. You learn people’s strengths. You step in without being asked. Over time, that builds something. It is not because night nurses are better, it is because the conditions basically require it. I think about that sometimes. What it would take to build that kind of cohesion on every shift, not just the ones where necessity forces it.

I have been on the other side of this too. As a new nurse, I had questions running through my mind constantly. But I wanted to impress my preceptor, so I stayed quiet. I thought silence looked like competence, as if I was taking everything in and keeping up. Looking back, that was a genuinely dangerous mindset. Not because I made errors, but because I was one missed question away from it.

What I have learned since then is that good nurses don’t know everything. That is not actually the point. The point is whether you are willing to ask.

I truly believe that most nurses still come to work wanting to do the right thing. But the environment tends to wear on you in ways that are hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been in it. Staffing gets tighter. The pace gets faster. Communication slips. Trust takes small hits that never fully heal. And instead of leaning on each other, we start pulling away. Sometimes it is obvious. More often it is just the absence of something, either a word, a hand, a moment of recognition when it would have mattered. And when that is the norm, it changes how we function together.

When nursing is fragmented, our voice carries less weight outside the floor. Decisions about staffing, workflow, and priorities move forward without the full perspective of the people actually providing the care. That is not necessarily anyone’s fault. It is just what happens when a group is divided. A divided profession doesn’t carry the same influence as a unified one.

I don’t think there is a clean fix for any of this. Culture doesn’t work that way. But I do think it starts in the same place it always has, which is on the floor, in the actual moment, between nurses. Helping each other when it would be easier not to. Answering a question without making someone feel like they should have already known. Recognizing that the person next to you is going through something, even if it looks different from what you might be dealing with.

Those moments may not feel like much, but they do accumulate. They shape whether people feel safe asking for help, whether they stay, whether they trust each other enough to function as a team when things get hard.

Nursing has always worked best when there is real cohesion, when people feel like they are not doing it alone. I don’t think it is gone. I think we have just drifted from it. I have seen what real cohesion looks like, mostly at night, mostly when necessity forced it, but I have seen it.

Maybe that is why I am optimistic. If we can build it under the hardest circumstances, then it is still there. We just have to be willing to do the work.

Adam J. Wickett is a psychiatric nurse.