I Dare You to Drink the Vinegar

A mental health nurse in 2026 is a specialist in working the fault lines between risk and relationship, safety and autonomy, biomedical power and human narrative. This is a question I first formally contemplated in my 2020 duoethnographic paper,  “ What is Mental Health Nursing Anyway? Advantages and Issues of Utilizing Duoethnography to Understand Mental Health Nursing .”  The role has never been simple, but the mix of rising acuity, digital surveillance, and enduring stigma has made its tensions more visible than ever. Asking myself the question, again Most recently, I have come back to this question through the lens of professional history in “A Profession Divided: Critical Reflection on the Evolution of Registered Psychiatric Nursing in Western Canada.” In that 2025 paper, I traced how institutions like Riverview Hospital and the BC School of Psychiatric Nursing shaped a distinct psychiatric nursing designation, and how its eventual closure and subsequent educational refor...

There is a kind of story about nursing careers that gets told in recruitment videos and in popular media (I'm looking at you Instagram). In TV and movies it usually looks like this: nursing, bedside story. Fade in: a nurse in scrubs orbits the main character (often a physician), appears in key moments of drama, then dissolves back into the background when the plot moves on. Even when nurses are centered, as with Nurse Jackie (a series about an expert ED nurse whose life is tangled in addiction) the story leans on extremes, as if a nurse can only be a main character by being spectacularly broken. In contrast, the careers that actually sustain nurses in Canada are far quieter and far more radical. They double back. They stall. They are rerouted by grief, by curiosity, by political awakening. They are shaped by patients who stay with us and by systems that both constrain and invite our courage. My own career trajectory, in acute mental health and substance use inpatient work, then cli...

More than half a decade has passed since I sat down with the Canadian Nurses Association to record an interview about racism in health care , an experience that became, as I now see with greater clarity, a pivotal moment in both my personal and professional development. Looking back, I am confused, bewildered, and honestly, incredibly disappointed, by how little seems to have changed in the years since I that interview was published. The Pandemic Exposed Systemic Injustice Take a deep breath and I will take you back 5 years. During the early chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we were all confined to our homes, it felt as though the world’s deepest systemic problems were suddenly front and centre for all to see on social media loop. The killing of George Floyd sparked global protests against anti-Black racism. At the same time, anti-Asian hate surged in Canada and around the world as rhetoric about the “China virus” circulated. Closer to home, the brutal and preventable hospital death o...

There’s a certain kind of wisdom that lives in the in-between moments of a nursing shift. It’s that space between the assessments and clinical documentation, the medication checks and the purposeful rounding, between the hand sanitizer pump and the how-are-you-this-morning. It’s a wisdom that doesn’t get measured or calculated in “hours of care” or captured in patient flow spreadsheets. It’s about presence. It’s about being with the patient, not just doing things to or for the patient. The longer I stay in this beautiful profession we call nursing, the more convinced I am: this is the core of our work. It’s the core of our profession and  our discipline (and if you recently graduated from an undergrad nursing program or are deep into your MSN you are intimately familiar with that debate)​ The Quiet Work of Being With the Patient It’s tempting, even seductive, to imagine that “knowing the patient” happens during a comprehensive assessment, or at medication administration time, or in...