nursingforsocialjustice

The world is complex. We cannot know everything. In order for the world to work we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust that the food we buy in the store isn’t full of poison, that the car we are driving was made in a factory…

Is psychiatric nursing, nursing? This was the question administrators, legislators, nurses and physicians in Canada grappled with almost 100 years ago. The question was settled. Of course psychiatric nursing is nursing. And in the 21st century to meet changing understanding of mental health and illness, and the changing role of…

Judging from my newsfeed and my Facebook feed and the chit chat in my dentist office the world is tense right now. Some distressing events have happened this year: multiple police caused deaths of black people in the US, multiple police deaths and incidents of police violence of police towards…

Nursing is a practice-based discipline. Sometimes I reflect on my understanding (or maybe acceptance) that it isn’t the same as a social science or a humanity. I started university when I was 17. In high school I loved existentialism. I was all about questioning why we were here, what the…

There is an interesting contrast between the main pages of Schools of Nursing in B.C. and Schools of Psychiatric Nursing. Love, Michelle D.

There are curious gifs that I see on social media about how much a job should not matter because it is not your real life. If your job isn’t your real life, what’s real life? This notion that I am replaceable and that people who are above me in the…

One of the benefits of knowing history is having insight about the work that has been done before, the context in which it developed and changed that happened as a result. Documents like this are important to know about. We need a collective memory. Love, Michelle D.

Deep frustration for the individualized focus of mental health services that distill social justice issues down to the mental health problems of the individual. I suppose this is the time of year when I have an existential crisis about the state of the mental health care system, the labelling, the…

I live in a world where the default setting is white. It’s not the time to sit back and wait for someone else to take the lead. We need to take the lead. Remember that time Canada embraced this idea of a rich cultural mosaic, where we embraced difference and…

It’s strange and heartbreaking sometimes, the talk that I am privy to when people don’t realize that my ethnicity is Filipino and Czech. People don’t know that my parents were immigrants. People don’t know that my father was a refugee. When you read the word refugee an image may have…