Infrahuman madness: Mental health nursing and the discursive production of alterity.

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an "othered" identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity-based understanding and recontextualized as an inferior category of "the human," circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes-contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity-based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice.

Thinking rhizomatically and becoming successful with disabled students in the accommodations assemblage: Using storytelling as method.

The number of disabled students enrolled in higher education institutions is increasing. Yet in disciplines such as nursing, where placements are an important part of student success, students' lived experiences, though an important and necessary aspect of promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion, has been ignored. In this paper, we respond to such issues by creating and utilizing a novel storytelling method that harnesses the antiessentialist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Storytelling empowers students to both describe their experiences and inform institutions on how to better serve them, and we use concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to provide a framework for thinking about students and their pathways toward success as multiple. As we show, applying storytelling as a method through this lens offers an expansion of strategies to put students first and, therefore, promote equity at the administrative, research, educational, and practical levels. We describe how thinking rhizomatically opens new avenues of insight, allowing for the creation of institutional assemblages based on a diverse array of students' needs, enabling them to become successful in their own ways.

Harnessing the power to bridge different worlds: An introduction to posthumanism as a philosophical perspective for the discipline.

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future 'for all.' In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses' commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for 'doing good' than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses' care. In this article, we explore how the focus on 'the human' in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human-centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human-social divide.

Toward critical thinking as a virtue: The case of mental health nursing education.

Critical thinking in nursing is largely theorized as a clinically-based idea. In the context of mental health education, this presents a problem, given documented evidence of a shift to demedicalize mental illness. Using institutional ethnography, this article examines the critical thinking of nursing faculty in a baccalaureate nursing program in a Canadian university by way of focus group interviews, observation periods, and the analysis of a number of institutional and legislative texts. The findings suggest that the critical thinking of nursing faculty is caught within a constrained institutional-textual order. Drawing on critical theory and Foucauldian philosophy, recommendations for nursing education are made in order to diversify and extend critical thinking in mental health nursing.

Managerial leadership for research use in nursing and allied health care professions: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Leadership by point-of-care and senior managers is increasingly recognized as critical to the acceptance and use of research evidence in practice. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify the leadership behaviours of managers that are associated with research use by clinical staff in nursing and allied health professionals. METHODS: A mixed methods systematic review was performed. Eight electronic bibliographic databases were searched. Studies examining the association between leadership behaviours and nurses and allied health professionals' use of research were eligible for inclusion. Studies were excluded if leadership could not be clearly attributed to someone in a management position. Two reviewers independently screened abstracts, reviewed full-text articles, extracted data and performed quality assessments. Narrative synthesis was conducted. RESULTS: The search yielded 7019 unique titles and abstracts after duplicates were removed. Three hundred five full-text articles were reviewed, and 31 studies reported in 34 articles were included. Methods used were qualitative (n = 19), cross-sectional survey (n = 9), and mixed methods (n = 3). All studies included nurses, and six also included allied health professionals. Twelve leadership behaviours were extracted from the data for point-of-care managers and ten for senior managers. Findings indicated that managers performed a diverse range of leadership behaviours that encompassed change-oriented, relation-oriented and task-oriented behaviours. The most commonly described behavior was support for the change, which involved demonstrating conceptual and operational commitment to research-based practices. CONCLUSIONS: This systematic review adds to the growing body of evidence that indicates that manager-staff dyads are influential in translating research evidence into action. Findings also reveal that leadership for research use involves change and task-oriented behaviours that influence the environmental milieu and the organisational infrastructure that supports clinical care. While findings explain how managers enact leadership for research use, we now require robust methodological studies to determine which behaviours are effective in enabling research use with nurses and allied health professionals for high-quality evidence-based care. TRIAL REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42014007660.