The crisis in mental health nursing - technicians or people?

This paper arises from an ongoing PhD on the nature of therapeutic knowledge in mental health nursing, undertaken in an English mental health Trust. Findings align with the wider literature indicating that there is a crisis... [ view full abstract ]

This paper arises from an ongoing PhD on the nature of therapeutic knowledge in mental health nursing, undertaken in an English mental health Trust. Findings align with the wider literature indicating that there is a crisis in mental health nursing. The findings suggest that there is a problem with psychiatric and psychological ideological control of mental health. This ideology is claimed as ‘scientific’, where the brain is both a biological organ subject to chemical imbalance, and a rational computational machine which can be set right by the introduction of correct algorithms.

Findings from this research indicate that this ideology narrows the experience of what it is to be human; the person is being reduced into a mechanism which can be understood and measured. Hence, mental health nursing is also in the process of being reduced to a technology, where nurses are skilled technicians in the service of the pharmaceutical 'cure'. Despite this technologizing, it was found that mental health nurses can work in ways that patients/clients value most, being: given time, listened to, recognized, cared about, and having someone who can walk alongside them in a society in which they are often lost. Crucially, findings indicate that how mental health nurses have learned to be this way has little to do with training or theoretical models, rather they have become this way with others. On this basis, it is suggested that nursing needs revision so that mental health nurses can have more confidence in the knowledge involved in being with an other, for the benefit of all mental health care - a knowledge that cannot be extracted and taught