The rights and responsibilities of citizenship for service users: some terms and conditions apply
- 14 August 2015
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing
- Vol. 22 (9), 698-705
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12258
Abstract
Service users have long been lobbying for equal participation as citizens, yet citizenship is an important and largely overlooked concept within nursing education and practice. The study explored service users' understandings of their rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the conditions placed on these. A total of 17 service users participated in semi-structured interviews. Isin's theory of the content of citizenship was used to analyze the data using a framework approach. Service users experience conditional citizenship that includes barriers to their participation and their rights and responsibilities that others in society enjoy. When the world of the service user is constructed through the language of the biomedical model, nurses may unwittingly reinforce psychiatric labels and thus perpetuate the stereotype that service users lack the competence to fully enact their rights and responsibilities. When providing care, nurses should incorporate the notion of therapeutic jurisprudence and the principles of reciprocity, procedural justice and the implementation of advanced directives to reduce conditions on service users' status as citizens.Keywords
This publication has 51 references indexed in Scilit:
- Qualitative data analysis: the framework approachNurse Researcher, 2011
- Epistemic injustice and the mental health service userInternational Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 2010
- Citizen minds, citizen bodies: the citizenship experience and the government of mentally ill personsNursing Philosophy, 2010
- Troubling ‘insight’: power and possibilities in mental health careJournal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 2006
- Powerlessness and Social InterpretationEpisteme, 2006
- Desiring Sameness? The Rise of a Neoliberal Politics of NormalisationAntipode, 2005
- Beyond Good Intentions. Making Anti-discrimination Strategies WorkDisability & Society, 2003
- Citizenship, class and the global cityCitizenship Studies, 1999
- Recovery and Empowerment for People with Psychiatric DisabilitiesSocial Work in Health Care, 1997
- Citizenship: Towards a Feminist SynthesisFeminist Review, 1997