Book Review
Introducing mental health nursing. A consumer-oriented approach
B Happell, L Cowin, C Roper, K Foster and R McMaster
ISBN: 978-1-741140-50-7; 2008; xi+397 pages; Allen & Unwin, NSW;
David Buchanan
De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom
At last there is an Australian text for undergraduates in mental health nursing that forays into the territory of mental health rather than traces around the tenuous map of psychiatric diagnoses. Its very title bodes such a foray: a consumer oriented approach, which is backed up with one of the authors identifying herself as a 'Consumer Academic'. Surely this is the stuff of a real introduction to the other in mental health: to see the person and not the constructed wound.
The text is divided into five parts. Each part is contextualised for the shape-changing nature of mental health with gentle enough coaxes into critical thinking and even a discussion on the language of mental health. Conceptual frameworks are discussed but for mine not near enough. Brenda Happell at the recent Australian Congress of Mental Health Nursing conference in Melbourne gave a passionate address on the need to construct a vision that she thought was bedevilled by two eras: the first, the era of the bureaucrat (given HoNOS is both construct invalid and unreliable and most KPIs circulatory in nature) and the second, the era of the brain (with its false determinism of neuroreceptor 'x' = mental illness 'y' with its equally false hope of medication x = life y).
There was, however, no mention of the era of dualism and the huge problems both conceptually and pragmatically for the other who has some illness thought to be all in the mind. The discourse in pain has advanced beyond dualism by opening up to the discourse of the neuroplastic rather than deterministic brain. The nearest this text gets to this is a wonderful section on why a comparison with diabetes is untenable. But unless we address the pitfalls of Cartesian errors we may be condemned to continually avoiding the greater concept that the brain's self-referentiality (that is its ability to defy our predictions, medications and diagnoses in the way it self-organises and 'plays') provides a potential pass - a way through to an embodied and perceptually rich concept of self-efficacy.
While for this reviewer, we must get past dualism in order to progress the self-efficacy of those with an illness termed 'mental', this is a brave and dignified text - beautifully written and conceived and given the current texts available - a must for any serious undergraduate nursing program in an Australian university.
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