Talking the talk: a discourse analysis of mental health nurses talking about their practice

Mental Health nursing exists as a discipline in the UK within the wider contemporary health care establishment. Throughout its history it has attempted to define itself in ways that differentiate mental health nursing practice from other health care professions and fields of nursing. However, it is not surprising in this climate of contemporary healthcare for individual professional identities to become 'lost' in the melange of interdisciplinary practice. This research presents a discourse analysis of individual mental health nurses' rhetorical constructions of their professional role(s) as they emerge in their talk with each other in focus group discussions. In particular, the focus in this paper is their discursive repertoires related to the historical legacy of mental health nursing and how this sits with what they consider to be a 'custodial and controlling' element of their role. The particular discourse analytic approach adopted in this study illustrates how individuals use language in a particular way to make justifications and explanations of mental health nursing identities. This analytic approach is ensconced within the domain of social psychology and lies at the interface of ethno-methodology and conversation analysis. It is concerned with structural units of discourse, beyond the level of the sentence, that emerge as the nurse participants engage in talking about their practice (Potter and Wetherell, 1987 p.53).