4/ Editorial introductions

Chapter 4 - The Ethics of Professionalised Care by Jim Moorey

Individual nurses and clinical teams, then, should try to maintain standards of quality and develop healing relationships with their clients, all the time remaining aware of the matrix of constraints and pressures on them. But there may be something greater even than the formidable forces detailed in chapters two and three in the way of professional healing for the mentally ill

Many of us working in this field come to a point of suspecting that, in truth, the very nature of our status as professional carers compromises our ability genuinely to care for patients. What, after all, are we doing when we help them work on 'their problems'? Certainly, we can take care to ensure that we work in a non-pathologising way. We can help to clarify with them the political and social aetiology of their ills. But can we ever be careful enough, to the extent that we avoid completely any level of collusion with the message that patients are, somehow, wrong. Jim Moorey may not feel comfortable, in these circumstances, to take the optimistic view and the easy way out; but he does show how it is possible to develop to a very great extent, both in principle and in practice, one's awareness of the ideological nature of our professional interactions, avowing that, if nothing else, we can at least maintain a level of ethical scrutiny, self-doubt and honesty in the work we do.

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