Finding Identity and Meaning as a Nurse with a Mental Illness

Through professional acculturation, nurses establish their identities as nurses. They also develop of an understanding what mental illness and associated phenomena mean. When nurses themselves develop mental illness, they must learn to establish a new identity as a patient and more specifically as a nurse-patient, and come to a new understanding of what mental illness means to them. This autoethnographic paper focuses on the author's own experience of finding an identity as nurse-patient and discovering what that really meant, at the same time incorporating analysis to connect the personal and the cultural.