mhnurse1Steve Williams (@mhnurselecturer) will be joined by Dan Warrender (@dan_warrender) live on Facebook on the 26th April 2023 @ 6.45pm.
You can watch the discussion live on MHTV by going to:
www.facebook.com/UniteMHNA/live
Dan Warrender wanted to be a singer/songwriter, but has the voice of a warthog and has been more successful as a mental health nurse and lecturer. After 3 years working in an acute inpatient unit, he stumbled into academia, and has taught mental health nursing for the last 9 years. He has engaged in clinical practice throughout that time, and continues to provide 1-1 mentalization based therapy both privately and through an honorary contract with the NHS. He started his PhD the day Donald Trump was elected and still isn’t finished, but he’s getting there, exploring experiences of crisis intervention for people diagnosed with ‘borderline personality disorder’. Several publications have covered topics such as crisis intervention, risk, ‘personality disorder’, mentalization, human rights, alcohol use, spirituality and mental health in film. He has been very vocal raising concerns about the direction of mental health nurse education, and in a keynote in 2022 described mental health nursing as becoming a ghost profession, with inadequate mental health content for future mental health nurses.
Steve Williams is currently an Assistant Professor in Mental Health Nursing at the University of Bradford where he has led and contributed to the delivery of Mental Health Nurse Education Pre-Registration and Post-Registration Programmes for the past 13 years. A registered Mental Health Nurse since 2001 Steve has been a community mental health nurse specialist and clinical nurse specialist in the NHS before venturing into Academic and research roles. As a clinician he specialised in delivering psychological therapies for people with “psychosis and personality disorder” drawing upon his prior education in Psychology and his advanced education in Psychological interventions as a Nurse Therapist. His academic career has included – leading the co-production of a Wellbeing Academy or “Recovery College” in 2016-2018 delivered by Clinicians and Service Users at the University – the first of its kind in the UK. The co-production of a Conference on Madness – the Big Mad Experience with students, service users and staff in 2013. He published an Autoethnographic volume on Psychosis – “Recovering from Psychosis: Empirical Evidence and Lived Experience” with Routledge in 2016, and co-edited the Critical Mental Health Nursing Networks first volume – “Critical Mental Health Nursing – Observations from the Inside” with PCCS-Books in 2018. He is currently working on further publications on Mental Health Nursing Practice that embrace critical and autoethnographical approaches. Steve says that his passion is for disrupting the status-quo of nursing clinical practice and educational practice drawing from his personal experience of services, service delivery, epistemic injustice and prejudice as a person with lived experience.
You can get involved in the development of future MH Nurse Education – Steve has formed a Mental Health Twitter Community the MH Nurse Education Think Tank.
This is an open community of people with a vested interest in seeing MH Nurse Education thrive and grow into what we all dream it could be. The Think-Tank grew out of the #MHDeservesBetter movement which Dan was an integral part of developing through the MHN Academics UK Network – a group of Mental Health Nurse Academics convened to develop and promote MH Nurse Education. The MHN Academics UK Network has been going since 2003, and includes many members largely working in UK Universities. The Network has a political remit and provides critique and expert consultation on matters that impact on MH Nurse education and clinical practice.
You can follow MHNAUK on their website: MHNAUK.
It’s very much worth looking at the other discussion videos on MHTV – for instance here’s one with colleagues Jonathan Gadsby and Mick Mckeown on their recent publication on Conscientious Objection in MH Nursing which partly emerged through their writing in Steve’s book: “Critical Mental Health Nursing: Observations from the Inside”.
The book was endorsed by the Critical Mental Health Nurses Network that Steve contributes to and was critically hailed as the first of its kind by reviewer Harry Gijbels as “A timely and much-needed publication, the first of its kind I believe in which the central argument is put forward that mental health nursing should subject itself to its own critical scrutiny”.
Mick and Jonathan, in addition to contributing their own chapters, on activism
and alliance with survivors (Mick) and nursing violence (Jonathan) alongside an international collection of other contributing authors, co-wrote a ground-breaking article on conscientious objection in the journal “Nursing Philosophy” that also was debated on the CMHNN website. CMHNN has held live conference events and online events that draws discussion from students, clinicians, educators and survivors on matters relating to MH nursing that matter to us all. Most recently a group of nursing students used the platform to critically engage with Dan on his concerns about the current nursing curriculum. The CMHNN really is a forum that can drive change and opens our profession to critical self-scrutiny. You can read the students excellent contribution here.
