Myths and misunderstandings about mental health nursing are damaging not only to the discipline but also affect the quality of services experienced by people needing mental health support. Contextually, these myths and misunderstandings abound due to stigmatising attitudes towards mental health, the dominance of generalist nursing in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, and generic undergraduate nurse education. They are perpetuated through a lack of awareness of the history of this specialty discipline, including its professional registration, education pathways and specialist knowledge, and a loss of graduate specialist skills required for safe and effective mental health nursing practice. It is important to analyse and correct these myths and address controversies as they have ramifications for the mental health nursing profession and mental health care.
A commonly repeated myth is that all nurses are mental health nurses, including those who work in a mental health setting. While perhaps not intended, this is a damaging and inaccurate myth. It comes from a misguided, albeit well-intended, effort to acknowledge that all nurses need fundamental mental health knowledge and skills to provide care to meet patients' needs. Indeed, they do. That does not make them mental health nurses with specialist nursing knowledge and skills.
Mental health (or psychiatric) nursing is a specialty field that ‘provides holistic care to promote the physical and psychosocial well-being of individuals at risk for or experiencing mental health conditions and/or substance misuse disorders or behaviour problems’ (International Council of Nurses 2024, 24). The mental health nurse role requires specialist qualifications in mental health. Other nurses in the field without specialist qualifications are nurses working in mental health.
This damaging myth serves to undermine and invalidate the specialty knowledge and skills of mental health nursing, as it implies any nurse can provide safe, skilled and effective mental health care, including for people with complex and severe mental health problems. This also strikes at the very identity of being a mental health nurse, an identity, knowledge and skill-base that differentiates this field from all other forms of nursing. This includes an intricate enactment of technical clinical skills such as talk-based therapies, risk reduction and holistic assessments. These skills are combined with non-technical capabilities of emotional intelligence, utilising self as a therapeutic tool and holding values and practices reflective of recovery and trauma-informed care (Hurley et al. 2022).
This myth has other implications, including nurses without specialist mental health qualifications and experience being considered fit to teach mental health to students in undergraduate nursing programs, or nurses forgoing undertaking specialist postgraduate mental health nur