Ideological themes in mental health nursing

Abstract

Contemporary practice does not exist in a vacuum: we are all part of history and can influence other’s history. Our ideas about care, treatment and helping are, at least in part, a function of history. The ideas which shape contemporary practice were themselves once shaped by now outmoded practices. Society’s need to distance itself from people with mental health problems produced the asylum tradition and, in time, the birth of modern psychiatry. Many major, early influences on 20th century psychiatry, merely translated older prejudices into theoretical standpoints: Jaspers maintained that ‘no great human difference’ could exist than between the normal person and the ‘psychotic’. Harry Stack Sullivan later felt impelled to state his belief that ‘psychotics’ were, more than anything else, ‘simply human’. Whatever kind of care or treatment people with mental health problems need, we should not forget to treat them, however different they may be from us, as ‘simply human’.