LAUSR

This discursive paper aims to clarify what roles mental health nurses identify as being within their scope of practice in clinical settings. It also aims to highlight any consumer benefits arising from these roles. Role theory and its relationship with identity are critically discussed as a framework to explain how contemporary mental health nursing roles are poorly understood and undervalued within mental health services. In order to meet the aims of the paper literature written in the last five years by clinical mental health nurses reporting their roles, and outcomes of those roles were searched. This literature was then considered through the lens of social constructionism that premises truths are accessed and then constructed though relationship based language. Six core mental health nursing roles were identified across international settings. The MHN is a psychotherapist. The MHN is a consumer advocate. The MHN is a physical health therapist. The MHN is a psycho-pharmacological therapist. The MHN is a relationship focussed therapist and finally the MHN is an aggression management therapist. While European and American nurses reported consumer benefit emerging from these roles those from Australia and the United Kingdom did not. The roles reported on were largely instrumental ones that offered little clarity towards the identity of our profession, nor its worth to consumers or funders of services. Mental health nurses will only have their true breadth of clinical capabilities recognized where there is a consistent construction emerging from clinicians in clinical settings on the efficacy of their clinical work.