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The promotion of the self‐managing capacities of people has become a marker of contemporary mental health practice, yet self‐management remains a largely uncontested construct in mental health settings. This discourse analysis based upon the work of Foucault investigates self‐management practices for bipolar disorder and their action upon how a person with bipolar disorder comes to think of who they are and how they should live. Using Foucault's framework for exploring the ethical self and transcripts of interviews with people living with bipolar disorder, this discourse analysis finds that the discursive practices of self‐management for bipolar disorder are prescribing a restricted regime for living based upon the quintessential neo‐liberal subject using practices that are focused upon managing an unreliable and problematic self. The article concludes with the proposition that the problem of bipolar disorder (for which self‐management is an answer) is less about the object itself and more about how we construct the nature of the self. A Māori indigenous ontology is used here as an example of an alternative discursive resource through which people make sense of the self and which allows ways of thinking about self‐management that engage with ambivalence and ambiguity rather than restriction and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personality disorders: illegitimate subject positions The diagnosis of personality disorder is common in mental health nurse settings and is a term often used without critical consideration. In clinical practice, the term personality disorder has pejorative connotations, which arise out of the way in which these behaviours are constructed as behavioural rather than psychiatric. The discursive construction of categories of personality disorder are inculcated into clinical practice and become taken-for-granted by those in practice culture. The construction of some personalities as disordered and, therefore, illegitimate becomes natural. This paper provides a critical analysis of the diagnosis and suggests an approach to mental health nursing care that is more legitimising for those people who receive psychiatric diagnoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine how the narrative of one woman, Madeleine, can be constructed as symptomatic of the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and how it can also be read from other perspectives, particularly a poststructural feminist one. The readings are presented as possibilities for understanding the woman’s experiences and the implications of this for mental health nursing practice. A poststructural feminist reading acknowledges the gendered experiences of subjectivity and how those experiences are constructed in language. The purpose of this paper is to identify for mental health nursing practice an approach which recognizes the figurative and literal characteristics of language in order to provide nursing care which positions the individual’s experience of mental distress as central. This requires an acknowledgement of Madeleine’s path into mental distress rather than simply a categorization of what is observed in a clinical setting. Intervention may need to include a range of strategies: medical and nonmedical, psychotherapeutic and social, physical and environmental. It may also require the provision of sanctuary and security whilst these options are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self‐management programmes provide strategies to optimise health while educating and providing resources for living with enduring illnesses. The current paper describes the development of a community‐based programme that combines a transdiagnostic approach to self‐management with mindfulness to enhance psychological coping for older people with long‐term multimorbidity. The six steps of intervention mapping (IM) were used to develop the programme. From a needs assessment, the objectives of the programme were formulated; the theoretical underpinnings then aligned to the objectives, which informed programme design, decisions on implementation, programme adoption and evaluation steps. Bandura's social cognitive theory informed the methods and practical strategies of delivery. Among the features addressed with participants are transdiagnostic dimensions such as fatigue, pain, breathlessness, sleep disturbances. The programme utilises mindfulness to aid coping and ameliorate the psychological distresses associated with chronicity. Findings from an initial feasibility study and subsequent pilot assisted in conceptualising our programme. In conclusion, applying IM gave the planners confidence the programme is robust and evidence‐based with clearly articulated links between the behavioural goals and design elements to obtain the desired outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]