4/ Editorial introductions

Returning to a theme underlined throughout the text, psychiatric nursing is based upon the development of nurse-patient relationships. Within these relationships, nurses may draw upon past life experiences to help them understand better the experiences of people in their care. In this text a number of nurses have been quite candid in their disclosures about mental health problems they have themselves suffered, and have advocated more disclosure of this sort from nurses and mental health workers generally. Chapter twenty four reviews the contribution made by the concept of the wounded healer to the helping process within psychiatric nursing. The authors consider the extent to which nurses are discouraged within orthodox mental health and psychiatric ideology from acknowledging their human frailties, and details the sort of responses which have been made to some nurses who have admitted to serious psychological or psychiatric problems. Their conclusions leave us with a bleak prospect of any potential for initiatives or progress in this area.