The corporate construction of psychosis and the rise of the psychosocial paradigm: emerging implications for mental health nursing

A major shift is underway that is changing what counts as lay and professional knowledge of ‘the psychoses’, with the emerging psychosocial paradigm increasingly challenging longstanding biomedical understandings in this area. This places a demand on international mental health nurse education, in countries where biomedical understandings of psychosis inform dominant lay and professional assumptions and practices, to both clarify its moral purpose and consider emerging implications for pedagogic practice and curricular content (BPS, 2014; Grant, 2015; Read and Dillon, 2013). Inaction will maintain the status quo of nurse educators causing minimal trouble to often socially and personally damaging institutional psychiatric business-as-usual. At a more troubling level, it will signal continued complicity with the corporate construction of such extremes of human distress as disease (BPS, 2014; Mosher et al., 2013).