Session 5: Nursing approaches to the care of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled
Session 5: Nursing approaches to the care of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled
Session outline
This session will consider the history of what is currently known in the UK as mental health and learning disability nursing. The session will examine the workforce of British asylums and ask why it developed into a nursing workforce. Similarities and differences between asylum and general hospital nursing will be considered in the light of the battle for control of nurse registration between the General Nursing Councils and the medical superintendents of the asylums. The effects of unionisation will be examined as well as the influence of class, race and gender in an area of nursing that has contained a large proportion of working class men as well as people from minority ethnic communities.
Session leader
Duncan Mitchell
Aims
- To consider the development of mental health and learning disability nursing in relation to each other and to general nursing
- To examine debates about the place of asylum work within nursing registration
- To critically evaluate the role of unions in the development of mental health and learning disability nursing
Content of the session
- The origins of mental nurse training in the nineteenth century
- The Medico Psychological Association and the General Nursing Council, competitors and colleagues
- Nurses' role in the asylums, the good the bad and the indifferent
- The scope of nursing identity
- The role of the unions within asylum work and the extent to which unionisation affected the development of nursing
- Class, gender and race within asylum nursing
- Similarities and differences between mental health and learning disability nursing
Teaching methods to be used
Pre-reading, tutorial and discussion
Indicative Reading
Davies,C. (ed), Rewriting Nursing History, London, Croom Helm, 1980.
Dingwall,R. Rafferty,A.M. & Webster,C. An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing, London, Routledge, 1988.
Glouberman, S. (1990) Keepers Inside Stories From Total Institutions, London, King Edwards's Fund for Nurses.
Mitchell, D. & Rafferty, AM. (2005) ‘I don't think they ever really wanted to know anything about us' staff stories in institutions for people with learning disability Oral History, Spring 2005 p77-87.
Mitchell, D. (2002) A contribution to the history of learning disability nursing, NTResearch, 7 (3) 201-210.
Mitchell, D. (2001) Nursing and social policy in the 1930s: A discussion of mental deficiency nursing, International History of Nursing Journal, 6 (1) 56-61.
Mitchell, D. (2000) Parallel Stigma? Nurses and people with learning disability, British Journal of Learning Disabilities 28, 78-81.
Nolan, P. (1998) A History of Mental Health Nursing Cheltenham Stanley Thornes
