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This paper will develop a discussion related to evidence-based knowledge for mental health nursing, arguing for a historical component to be included in the comprehensive degree programme that will offer significant insights into mental health nursing knowledge from historical information and constructing implications for contemporary practice. Our understanding of the present is clearer by this looking back and forth and by adding meaning (and what the meanings mean) to what historically preceded. It allows the history of psychiatry to be a much more productive, useful, and a continual source of wisdom for the here and now. This blending of past knowledge with contemporary inquiry can offer depth in mental health nursing practices by forming a context for practice for the beginning nurse practitioner.

History is consistently acknowledged as crucial to the identity of a profession. In the case of mental health nursing this is perhaps more so, as published accounts of the history of nursing rarely pays attention to the specialty of mental health. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the history of mental health nursing in Australia. It is concluded that an understanding of history is essential in understanding and interpreting contemporary mental health service delivery and seeking to overcome the professional distance between mental health and other branches of nursing.

Early in this century, adolescence began to emerge as a discrete, biologically based and, therefore, "natural" subject category. The psychiatric profession engaged in the discursive production of the adolescent through the identification, classification and use of the psychiatric illness of adolescent insanity. The mental disease of youth, dementia praecox, drew young men into a tutelary relationship with psychiatrists, who were eager to delineate the appropriate strategies for avoidance of the age-specific mental disease.