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Accessible summary What is known on the subject? According to estimates more than half of adult mental health service users are parents, but their experiences are largely lacking from research literature., Parental mental illness can often be viewed from a risk perspective., Parents with mental illness and their families have unmet support needs., What this paper adds to existing knowledge? Parents with mental illness want acknowledgement that they can be able and responsible., Many parents adopt an expert by experience identity., Fathers can feel their parental role is not recognized and mothers express fears of being judged if they discuss their illness., What are the implications for practice? Adult mental health services need to recognize and support parental role of service users., Joint care planning and family oriented care should be promoted., Professionals should take advantage of the knowledge of these parents and they could be more actively engaged in service development., Abstract Introduction Parental mental illness is often viewed from a risk perspective. Despite this, being a parent can be both valuable and motivating. Research literature lacks the perspective of mothers and fathers, who have experienced mental illness. Aim This study explores how parents with mental illness construct their identities as mothers and fathers and their experiences with health and social care services. Method Three focus groups with 19 participants were conducted in Finland and Scotland. Methods of discourse analysis have been used in to analyse the interview data. Results Adult service users want their parenting role recognized and supported. Parents have knowledge and skills which can be utilized and many have adopted an expert by experience identity. Discussion Being able to see oneself as a 'good' parent can be challenging but important. Parents may require support, but want to be included in the planning of their care. Services could make more use of the knowledge and skills parents and families have, and joint working could lessen parents' anxieties. Implications for practice Mental health practitioners are in a key position in providing more family centred, resource focused care. Service user expertise should be acknowledged in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessible summary Research into the patient's perspective on their care is being given increasing importance within health and nurse education policy, predicated upon the idea that the findings represent the patient experience., Researchers have power to silence the voices of research participants through the process of authorship. Exploring the arts as a means of presenting findings offers the opportunity problematize issues of power and authorship, and examine ways of decentring the researcher's voice., Re/presentation of patient experience in poetic form encourages readers to engage with that experience as they have to actively interpret the meaning of the poem., Researchers interested in examining and conveying the experience of others should be encouraged to problematize issues of authorship and consider the impact of their authority on the re/presentation of the experience of the other., Abstract The study aimed to understand the experience of being a patient on an acute psychiatric inpatient ward. A further aim was to open up spaces for the voices of participants to be heard. Contemporary government policy places patient experience at the centre of healthcare policy and service development. Despite this, those who occupy marginalized discourses struggle to be heard within the dominant discourse of health care. A qualitative approach was used, and narrative was conceptualized as representing experience. Sociolinguistic theories informed the development of the analytic framework treating meaning as contextual and arising from both content and structure of narratives. Concepts of representation, voice and authorship were problematized. Thirteen people who had been inpatients on an acute psychiatric inpatient ward participated. Narrative data were gathered using unstructured interviews. The data were analysed holistically using a method that attended to both the structure and content of the narrative. The product of these holistic narratives was the development of a poem representing each participant's experience. This paper focuses on the development of these poems as a method of decentring the authorial voice and opening up spaces for the voices of the participants to be heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acute psychiatric inpatient care forms an integral part of mental health services. Few studies have focussed on the patient experience of acute care. Research into patient experience is increasingly important to policy and service development processes. Knowledge of patient experiences facilitates the development of nursing practice. The aim of the study was to gain insight into the experience of being a patient on an acute inpatient psychiatric ward. Thirteen participants were recruited from the acute ward. Unstructured interviews were used to gather narrative data of their experiences. Holistic analysis of the narratives was informed by Gee's socio-linguistic theories that meaning is linked to narrative structure. Reading of the holistic analyses yielded themes of help, safety and power running across the participants' experiences. The patient experience was characterized by dissonance between expectation and experience, the search for a nurse--patient relationship and the development of strategies to cope with being on the acute ward. This paper focuses on the theme of 'Help' where participants describe their expectation that they will receive help through the development of relationships with the nurses, and their experience of the barriers to this. In response, participants developed strategies to support each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]