Demedicalising misery: Welcoming the human paradigm in mental health nurse education

Queering the relationship between evidence-based mental health and psychiatric diagnosis: Some implications for international mental health nurse curricular development

“…Despite this, the dominant systems of psychiatric diagnoses from the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization have become increasingly instrumental in sustaining international norms around what constitutes 'mental illness' over the last six decades. Although discredited, our experiences as academics tell us that the cultural hegemony of psychiatric diagnostic systems in the UK is supported by the form and content of mental health nurse educational curricula and related mental health professional and institutional practice exigencies (Grant, 2015).…”

“…EB mental health epistemologies informed by biomedical assumptions have recently been discredited on the basis of deeply flawed science (Grant, 2015;Johnstone, 2014;Thomas 2014). Despite this, the dominant systems of psychiatric diagnoses from the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization have become increasingly instrumental in sustaining international norms around what constitutes 'mental illness' over the last six decades.…”

“…Normative judgements are made about them on the basis of diagnostic labels that lack scientific validity and reliability (Grant, 2015;Johnstone, 2014;Thomas, 2014). Already reductionist in defining people in terms of specious pseudo-illness categories that fail to honour richness of individual identity and life-context, such judgements are, at worst, added to with a an overlay of stigmatising and othering lables that arise as a result of staff-service user intergroup dynamics (Grant and Leigh-Phippard, 2014;Grant et al, 2015).…”

“…These frameworks are informed by normative assumptions around class, age, disability, race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, gender, and ethnocentric biases in professional mental health practice around diagnosis and classification (Grant, 2015;Thomas, 2014). The social and professional processes of normative identity construction function both to police and restrict who can be regarded as viable subjects.…”

“…As a result of this -what might be reasonably regarded as normative violence -the lives of many mental health service users become invisible (Butler, 2004), in that their unique stories of the experiences and events contributing to their troubles are silenced and remain unheard (Grant, 2015;Grant and LeighPhippard, 2014;Grant et al, 2015;Johnstone, 2014;Thomas, 2014). An EB discourse-informed mental health nursing curriculum thus arguably plays a constituent part in trapping many mental health service users in reductionist institutional psychiatric biographies.…”