[Nursing Progress Notes in Psychiatry: Mental Health Archival Data]

Introduction Nurses' notes are used primarily as a communication tool between nurses, doctors and member of the professional team to ensure continuity of patient care. They contain life-history of individuals with mental health disorders. This nurses' communication tool describes the patient care during hospitalization in acute psychiatric ward. In fact, these observations contained in the progress notes represent more than a simple picture of mental illness. They always tell a story constructed by socio-cultural norms.Objectives The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the value of these narratives data as a comprehensive source of information to understand the experience of mental health following the deinstitutionalization project.Results The use of nursing progress notes of the Psychiatric Department allows, among other things, a better understanding of the life course of some hospitalized patients. The narrative data in those documents enhance the intersection between personal experiences and social, institutional and professional structures. These primary sources offer a multitude of possibilities in mental health research and can be examined from different angles of analysis. They deserve to be exploited in future research project to increase our understanding of mental illness.