A feminist critique of psychiatric nursing discourse

Abstract

This theoretical research explores the discourse, language, texts, and practices that are part of the everyday work world of psychiatric nursing. How information is created, what becomes established knowledge, and how it is disseminated are the foci of this particular discourse. Psychiatric nursing "science" has developed from the work of nursing theorists and researchers in an attempt to raise the status of nursing. The result has been that this knowledge wields power. Most of this knowledge is based on positivist assumptions to predict and control patients' behavior. Drawing upon the work of postmodernists and the sociology of knowledge experts in discourse analysis, this paper concludes that, because information is humanly constructed, nurses have the power to alter knowledge, and thereby to bring about alternative ways of knowing and subsequent social and political change.