Mental health nursing in the 1960s remembered

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT?: A growing literature is revealing the historical roles of nurses, their work and the various treatments with which they were involved. Remarkably little, however, has been written by nurses themselves about the culture in which they worked and the beliefs and values they held. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE?: In providing a personal account of psychiatric nurse training in the 1960s, this paper seeks to show the ways in which hospital culture and clinical practices shaped nursing identities and the attitudes of nurses towards their work. WHAT ARE IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE?: This paper contributes to understanding the influence of cultural, managerial and attitudinal factors in shaping the work of mental health nurses and the quality of clinical outcomes they can achieve. ABSTRACT: For more than a century, mental hospitals were bedevilled by political disinterest, under-resourcing, patient neglect and over reliance on medication and ECT to ensure compliance. Labelling mental health problems as illnesses silenced patients while empowering doctors. In the 1960s, social revolution brought about major changes for mental health care including a reduction in hospital beds, the growth of community services, improved pharmacological and psychological interventions and the rise of patient activism. Tensions between biomedical and psychological models of mental illness arose which persists to the present day. Although historians have studied this period from different perspectives, relatively little has been written by nurses. This is a personal account of nursing in a large psychiatric hospital between 1962 and 1965.