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...

  In the attempt to make psychiatry a legitimate medical specialty diagnostic criteria were developed. In Canada, psychiatrists use DSM-5 diagnoses not just to organize, but also to justify treatment. In an era where we know about the importance of patients being active partners in their care, we must seek the input of our patients on their agreement or disagreement with diagnostic criteria. In practice, especially in the inpatient system where most people who are admitted are involuntary patients, the healthcare system maintains a culture of clinicians having power over patients. The imbalance of power sustains a system where clinicians, most prominently psychiatrists, are the ultimate decision-maker and nurses become stuck in a murky place of advocating for patients, exercising their own autonomy of holistic and person-centered care, while also acting on psychiatrists orders. The process continues to be a top-down approach despite attempts to embrace and implement collaborative ...

I think I forgot that I wrote this blog again, until a nursing professor from a university in the US emailed me to ask permission to use an entry as a recommended reading for a class they teach. Blogs are such an interesting thing for me. I love writing and for some reason I think that I will have a excess of free time to write. I have written many since I was 16 and discovered them in the vast expanse of the Internet. I have a few on the go right now that I most use as a means of reflecting on my nursing practice and also reflecting on being a parent. I do not think I ever expect anyone will actually read my ranting and sometimes academic thoughts so it was a pleasant surprise and welcome reminder that someone in the world may be reading this and that it may be helping fellow nurses in some way. The Discharge Conversation Yesterday I had a conversation with a student about what the appropriate intervention is when a patient that is being discharged openly tells the nurse that they w...

Last night I attended the BC Nurses Union update dinner. The members of the BCNU will have a ratification vote on October 18th, 2012 for the proposed contract. From what I understand it seems that the bargaining unit did a good job. The new contract had some gains, uses very clearly worded language that is easy to understand and implement, we will be returning to a 37.5 hour work week and there will be 2125 new full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs added provincially. Some people at the dinner seemed happy with this and some people at the dinner seemed frustrated by the lack of gains. However, I think that we have to understand that ultimately, it is not the failure of the bargaining team that is the result of seemingly wishful gains like a cost of living wage increase, more money for education and safer staffing province wide, it is the public and the tax payers collectively that decide what we are worth. I think that many people complain when taxes go up, when they have to pay sales tax ...

My biggest pet peeve about being a casual nurse is that I am never quite sure if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I have had 2 casual jobs (4 if you count the two orientations that I did at BC Children's Hospital that I never picked up any shifts for) since I began my nursing career in 2008. My first casual position was on the inpatient acute psychiatric unit at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. I began in 2010, picked up my first shift in 2011, and only did that one shift before I decided that the level of anxiety that I felt walking into that shift was not worth me taking anymore. My second casual position, with Coast Mental Health in the concurrent disorders transitional housing, began in September 2011. This position is not terribly anxiety-inducing, yet I still ask myself every shift, is this really all I'm supposed to be doing? Every shift I work I look around the tiny medication room that I find myself stuck in for 8 hours th...