It is common in most areas of psychiatric healthcare that nurses come into contact with threatening and aggressive patients. In order to ensure that healthcare units shall be able to meet the needs of patients and at the same time be certain that the work environment is safe for nurses, it is important to precision what threats and violence actually mean. If threatening and violent situations can be identified before they lead to physically or psychologically damaging encounters, this will save the both patients and nurses unnecessary suffering. The Purpose: was to bring to light nurses’ definitions and experiences of threats and violence and at the same time describe how they perceive daily working enviroment within psychiatry. The Method: the work was built on twenty nurses presently working in various psychiatric clinics. We made use of a data collection method that is built upon semi-structured interviews where we there after, in a sytematic and step by step process, classified the data through qualitative content analysis in order to more easily identify and condense pertinent sentence concepts. We created codes which were then placed into three categories. The Results: are split up into categorys: The precision of threats of violence, the experience of threats, and violence in the workplace. These categories are presented by the codes: threat, violence, sexual harassment, direct threats, the effects of threats, violence in combination with compulsory psychiatric care, the consequences of threats and violence, the acceptance of threats and violence, safety measures, the psychiatric nurses’ work enviroment, and the support of the nurses’ colleagues and the care organisation, were made apparent during the interviews. The Discussion: The majority och nurses enjoy their job and feel safe working at psychiatric clinics and wards, despite that incidents of threats and violence do occur.