Critical debate 17.1

Possible answer

This is clearly an important debate. Providing support to people so that they are able to cope optimally with life’s stresses and vicissitudes must be an important part of a mental health nurse’s role. The aspiration that people’s resilience to adversity is such that they might avoid or minimise episodes of mental distress is similarly laudable. Nevertheless, the critique of ‘resilience’ as a concept suited to an unfair neo-liberal economic regime is persuasive too. Nurses must guard against the sort of reasoning or representation that depicts the sufferers of mental distress as culpable in their own disadvantage. It clearly serves the status quo if people are to be blamed for their problems, and this is absurd when we think about the social factors that determine life chances and mental health and distress. Of course, this focus on the individual as opposed to the collective levels in society is typical of an uncritical adoption of a medical model, and the complicity of psychiatry within systems of social control. The desire for this book to help mental health nurses to be continuously reflexively critical is one tool in an armoury for nurses to be resilient against such tendencies of a ‘psy-complex’. Arguably, nurses who are critical of the misuse of concepts such as resilience may also find themselves more active in a wider politics of mental health, or politics more generally.