From Subjective Opinion to Medical Fact: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mental Health Nursing Education

Using various methods and strategies of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article demonstrates how certain influential nursing texts generate a certain biomedical framing of the mental health nursing assessment. Accordingly, the mental health assessment in undergraduate nursing education becomes imb...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Issues in mental health nursing 2023-01, Vol.44 (1), p.55-63
Main Authors: Adam, Simon, Gold, Efrat, Burstow, Bonnie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Discourse analysis
Education, Nursing
Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate - methods
Evaluation
Governance
Health status
Humans
Medical education
Medical personnel
Mental Health
Mental health professionals
Nursing education
Psychiatric Nursing - education
Psychiatric-mental health nursing
Psychiatry
Students, Nursing - psychology
Urgency
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Summary:Using various methods and strategies of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article demonstrates how certain influential nursing texts generate a certain biomedical framing of the mental health nursing assessment. Accordingly, the mental health assessment in undergraduate nursing education becomes imbricated in processes of governance that legitimate psychiatric discourse by 1. Presenting the opinions and judgements of mental health professionals as objective scientific facts; 2. Utilizing grammatical mood and modality to convey a matter-of-fact urgency and necessity for psychiatric intervention that is made to appear largely through conjecture and passive logical leaps; and 3. Through hybrid fusion with other scientific and medical disciplines that lend credibility to psychiatry through association. While we largely focus on critique of the mental health assessment, we buttress this critique using two other institutional texts that draw on a psychiatric framing of mental health, to demonstrate how these texts reinforce and work in discursive cohesion with the mental health assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of these consequences to nursing education and nursing students and educators alike.
ISSN:0161-2840
1096-4673
DOI:10.1080/01612840.2022.2113940