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...

Do you ever wonder if there is any practical application to the reflective journal assignments that are assigned in undergraduate nursing programs? The assignments that we may have been quick to dismiss as the "fluffy stuff", in favour of the the "real nursing", like taking a blood pressure or changing a complex dressing.  I think that the answer to this question depends on what one's understanding of Registered Nursing is, and also, what the role of the Registered Nurse is in practice.   If you believe that Registered Nursing is comprised of a series of tasks that are completed throughout the day to help sick people, then it may be that the value of engaging in reflective journaling to improve one's practice may be a hard activity to sell. However, if you believe that Registered Nursing is a complex process involving assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation, then you might believe otherwise.  I am going to try to explain the utility of...