This paper is informed by interpretivist understandings and practices, and the author's own conversion to interpretivist writing practice. The aim of the paper is to critique the ways in which suffering people are represented in the mainstream cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) literature with a view to identifying some implications for mental health nursing practice. It will begin by identifying key assumptions governing the textual portrayal of human experience, and will argue that the language used to describe human suffering is a potential site for struggles over meaning and more adequate representation. However, reductionist portrayals of individuals and their problems have largely gone unchallenged in much of the CBT literature since its early development in the 1970s. This is arguably because of the socialization of new members of the CBT community into established cultural and textual practices. A comparison of reductionist CBT writing with more fleshed out, more fully human possibilities will further clarify that forms of representation are never neutral, given the danger of reductionist representations facilitating reductionist interventions. The paper will end with the following emerging implications for mental health nursing practice: the therapeutic power of self-narratives, narrative research and the recovery movement, and the promising possibilities for autoethnographic research for mental health nurses and for day to day interactions between nurses and service users.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing.