ABSTRACT
Advertisements for more senior psychiatric nursing jobs sometimes ask for ‘a relevant degree’. If you ask what subjects of degree are considered relevant (as I have occasionally) you will be told psychology or sociology. My degree (in English and French) has never been considered ‘relevant’. It has even been the subject of amused puzzlement at a few job interviews I have endured, but – far from writing off four years of my life as an irrelevant prelude to my nursing career – I have always tried to ‘positively re-frame’ my degree as one infinitely relevant to psychiatric nursing. Rather in the spirit of the Polish psychologist, who admitted, ‘We psychologists are only the plumbers of the psyche. It is the novelists and playwrights who are the poets of human interaction’ (O’Brien and Houston 2000: 76).
