Exploring the relationship between compassion fatigue, stigma, and moral distress among psychiatric nurses: a structural equation modeling study.

Background: Psychiatric nurses experience unique emotional and ethical challenges, including moral distress, associative stigma, and compassion fatigue, that can negatively affect their mental health and clinical performance. The complex relationship among these variables has not been clearly defined. Thus, this study aimed to determine the levels of compassion fatigue, associative stigma, and moral distress and to investigate how these factors interact with an emphasis on the role of compassion fatigue in mediating the relationship between associative stigma and moral distress.