An analysis of discourses shaping mental health practitioners

Abstract

A mental health practitioner (MHP) role was introduced to health services in southern England in 2003. The paper will discuss the initial phase within a longitudinal research study. A discursive approach will be adopted in order to understand how healthcare discourses constrain and provide possibilities for the emergence of a new worker role in mental health. The manner in which MHPs understand and talk about their work is socially constructed in interaction and constantly being modified by competing discourses. This paper will analyse three overarching health discourses, namely, the biomedical, person-centred and psychological discourses that have shaped MHP trainees. Discourses intersect to inform the role, where practices of nursing, psychology, medicine and occupational therapy are combined. Thus, the inclusion of physical, psychological and person-centred components of care serve as a multifaceted approach to care. This form of interprofessionalism leads MHPs one step closer in the advance towards an interdisciplinary discourse of holistic care.

Staff's Experiences of a Person-Centered Health Education Group Intervention for People with a Persistent Mental Illness

“…The organizational structures with boundaries between the two main care authorities, in fact, raise obstacles to achieving person-centered mental health care. The biomedical, psychological, and person-centered areas in mental health care overlap; flexibility is required in order to maintain optimal cooperation (Zeeman & Simons, 2011). The results show that the person-centered group intervention was not given priority and specific financial resources were not made available within the organization.…”

‘Sustaining Place’ – a grounded theory of how informal carers of people with dementia manage alterations to relationships within their social worlds

“…The nature and meaning of reality are constructed and conveyed in the context of interactions in social contexts (Gergen , Zeeman & Simons ). As social constructions, how dementia and caring are understood by nurses and other professionals can affect how those who live with dementia are viewed, positioned and acted towards.…”

Methodology and mental illness: resistance and restorying

“…Indeed, from a post‐structural perspective, this would not be possible. In Zeeman & Simons' () study, the main focus on the quality of service user/professional interventions, it does not, however, acknowledge that Foucault viewed all clinical settings primarily first and foremost as sites in which subjects are constituted in order to comply with relations of power. This is not a criticism – a paper must necessarily limit its focus – but it should not be overlooked that the provision of care is not ideologically neutral.…”

“…While service users may have a vested interest in the problematization of biomedical discourses, however, biomedical discourses are equally instrumental in sustaining power inequalities between different groups of professionals, thereby buttressing the dominant status enjoyed by the most powerful group (physicians) over allied professions (Mancini , Powers , Zeeman & Simons ). According to Zeeman & Simons (), who examined the introduction of the role of mental health worker (MHW) in Southern England, holistic forms of care that underpin this relatively new role have gone some way to challenging biomedical discourses through the promotion of psychological and person‐centred discourses (Zeeman & Simons ). This, it is argued, has led to more holistic forms of practice that do not identify the service user merely as the object of the medical gaze.…”