Negotiating Realities

This work, based on conversations in practice, makes a contribution to the methodology of psychiatric nursing research, and to understanding the basis of practice. The study on which it was based explored interaction between patients diagnosed as "neurotic" and nurses in two Scottish psychiatric admission wards. Discourses of British and American psychiatric nursing literature are examined to illustrate problems of theoretical understanding of psychiatric nursing practice. Through a qualitative analysis based on fieldwork and on nurses' and patients' accounts of their day-to-day talk, the book explores the "common sense" of psychiatric nursing negotiated when patients and nurses "work" to recover the patients to the "paramount reality" of everyday life. The author discusses the empirical findings in terms of knowledge, power, and moral order from both interpretive and Foucaultian perspectives; and poses new arguments about accountabilbity in psychiatric nursing.