Abstract
This project applied ethnographic content analysis to examine 19 American films made during the period 1942-2005. The purpose of this examination is to consider how the medium of American film portrays psychiatric mental health nursing and its world within the hospital. It critiques the way film frames mental health nursing and the profession's interactions with other disciplines, such as psychiatry, that might reveal a disposition that is peculiar to this group. It concludes that Hollywood film genre continues to perpetuate the notion that mental health nursing occupies an aberrant, secret, and dangerous world and that its role remains one of custodial companionship. If Chiari, Pinel, and Tuke, the founders of moral therapy during the Age of Reason observed these films, they could be forgiven if they wondered whether psychiatric mental nursing remained trapped in the Middle Ages While some of the films reviewed may be considered vacuous nonsense, its discourses reflect how society views people with serious mental illness and those who nurse them. This critique is a challenge for the profession to educate society regarding the profession's true work, reclaiming its commitment to affirming the dignity and human rights of those with mental illness by instigating political strategies that will destabilize the subversive and dividing practices that film merely manipulates.
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