ABSTRACT
The ‘mental health’ field has become an increasingly contested ideological arena. At one pole lies the reductionist accounts of ‘mental illness’ as a genetically determined, biological disorder, and, at the other, an equally radical perspective, framing all so-called ‘mental’ problems as symptoms of social malaise, life crisis, poverty and disadvantage. Although talk about ‘mental health nursing’ has been around for decades, it remains an emergent concept; still trying to clarify its identity; still trying to establish where, if anywhere, it fits on the ‘illness-social malaise’ continuum. Will ‘mental health nursing’ remain a health-based discipline, retaining its powerful attachment to medicine; or will it become more of a social care discipline, relating to a wider range of social and community-based organizations? Perhaps the answer will lie somewhere else, in a radically new departure, involving the splintering or subdivision of the discipline into a range of ‘caring’ roles, all focused on nurturing human development.
