Mental health clinicians work within a recovery framework that is rights based and emphasizes positive and respectful approaches to working with mental health consumers. Mental health nurses' practice is also predicated on holism and inclusiveness, yet consumers' sexuality is sometimes neglected and rights in this area overlooked. Also overlooked is sexuality as an area for investigation, particularly from a consumer perspective, even though it constitutes part of consumers' broader remit of sexual health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe body of the one deemed mad often remains a sexual body with sexual needs. Mental health services respond to these demands of the body in various ways, including constructing rules around physical movement. In this context, we were interested in how mental health clinicians problematized the sexual needs and practices of residents of a long-stay mental health rehabilitation facility and how solutions were constructed in relation to the residents' sexual desires.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs
April 2020
What Is Known On The Subject: The intersection of sexuality and psychosis has a long history, yet research in this area has been minimal over the past few decades. Mental health clinicians practice from within the confines of a mental health system that is founded on a conflict between containment and care and that positions the consumer as an object of care. At the same time, mental health services often have a Recovery approach to care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is well established, following Menzies' work, that nursing practice produces considerable anxiety. Like Menzies, we bring a psychoanalytic perspective to a theorization of anxiety in nursing and do so in order to consider nursing practice in the light of psychoanalytic theory, although from a Lacanian perspective. We also draw on Bataille's notion of 'surplus'.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is well established that nursing practice produces considerable anxiety, and it can also give rise to envy and jealousy. While envy in nursing was identified in the literature more than 50 years ago, there remains a paucity of articles addressing either envy or jealousy for nurses. In a recent research study on current experiences of clinical practice, we analysed a fragment of nurses' speech via Klein's theory of jealousy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe nurses' relationship to knowledge has been theorised in a variety of different ways, not the least being in relation to medical dominance. In this study, the authors report on one of the findings of a case study into nurses' anxiety informed by psychoanalytic theory. They argue that the nurse's subjection to the knowledge of the other health professional, inclusive of the doctor, can be a transference arising in the context of anxiety for the nurse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOccupational stress in nursing has attracted considerable attention as a focus for research and as a consequence multiple objects of nurses' stress, or 'stressors', have been identified. This paper puts into question the dominant conceptual and methodological approach to occupational stress in nursing research by both foregrounding the notion of anxiety and juxtaposing it with the notion of 'stress'. It is argued that the notion of 'stress' and the domination of the questionnaire have produced a narrow reading of the topic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper reports on the findings of a study that considered how anxiety might function to organise nurses' practice. With reference to psychoanalytic theory this paper analyses field notes taken during a series of nursing change-of-shift handovers. The handover practices analysed met all the criteria for a ritual, as understood in psychoanalytic theory, and functioned to alleviate anxiety in the short term while symbolically expressing a forbidden and unknown knowledge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Ment Health Nurs
December 2005
Information is given a privileged place in the psychiatric clinic, as illustrated by the prevalence and volume of data to be collected and forms to be completed by psychiatric nurses. Information though is different to knowledge. The present paper argues that information is part of a managerial discourse that implies commodification whereas knowledge is part of a clinical discourse that allows room for the suffering of the patient.
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