Four students and their tutor at a UK school of nursing had a conversation as part of the series of classroom discussions presented here on this website. In earlier sessions, a significant article was discussed and our understandings and reflections were written up in a collaborative process. On this occasion, wishing to experiment and add... Continue Reading →
Wendell Berry: Health is Membership… and The Plants are Watching!
‘The piece returns me to thoughts I had before I started my training that my training has turned on its head. Before I started I believed that it was relevant to say that humanity needed to get back to a better, natural place and I felt the world has moved away from that. However, every... Continue Reading →
Asylum Years: Interview with the authors
The following post is from Jonathan Gadsby:Asylum Years: Back to the Future? Glimpses of Institutional Life in the 1970s by Robert Hayward and Andrew Heenan is likely to be of real interest to mental health nurses engaged in thinking about our profession’s past, present and future. The book will be published in March 2025, by... Continue Reading →
RIP Andy Hanson
In July 2018, RMN Andy Hanson got in touch with us, responding to a call we put out to hear from mental health nurses about their working lives and experiences. Andy wrote us a wonderful piece about his nursing experiences. It forms a powerful and important testament about the work of mental health nurses. You... Continue Reading →
Student Nurses Discuss Hearing Voices and Self-compassion
Thank you to some students and a tutor of a UK-based class of nursing students for the following, which is a report of a small-group discussion. Some of those students were embarking on the final of four years of study (in order to become dual qualified nurses) and others the final of three years (to... Continue Reading →
Response from Haley Peckham
Last month we posted a report of a MHN classroom discussion here in the UK. It was part of a module in which student nurses were encouraged to consider the range of ideological forces at play in their work and the real-world consequences. The module had the strapline: "There is always another side to every story".... Continue Reading →
The Neuroplastic Narrative in the classroom
The following is a report of a UK-based student mental health nurse discussion group. The mixed group of eight mental health nursing students comprised some who were working towards a Masters-level pre-registration qualification, some working towards an undergraduate award, one of whom is on a degree-level apprenticeship programme, and their tutor (also a mental health... Continue Reading →
Student MHN Classroom response to Connell et al.
Dear Chris Connell, Emma Jones, Michael Haslam, Jayne Firestone, Gill Pope and Christine Thompson, We are class of mental health nursing students in the UK, a mixture of BSc nursing students and some 'RNDA' students (also degree-level nursing students but completing pre-qualification education as apprentices). Most of us are doing the standard Future Nurse Curriculum... Continue Reading →
Brief response to queries about the new All Wales Psychiatric Genomics Service
Thank you to all those who have been in touch about this. It would be wrong to say that the Critical Mental Health Nurses' Network takes the following view, because a network of critical thinkers does not aspire to have just one view on a subject. However, our network (which is not something with a... Continue Reading →
Student MHN Classroom response to Dan Warrender
Dear Dan Warrender,We are a group of 3rd year mental health nursing students in the UK, completing our first field-specific module in the Future Nurse Curriculum. Today we have spent several hours with our tutor discussing your recent paper, Mental health nursing and the theory-practice gap: Civil war and intellectual self-injury.We found it very striking and... Continue Reading →
Critical Mental Health Nurses' Network 