What is a Mental Health Nurse in 2026?
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...