Accounting for Accountability: a Discourse Analysis of Psychiatric Nurses’ Experience of a Patient Suicide

This article explores how 2 psychiatric nurses construct & orient to accountability when talking of their experiences of a patient suicide. Discourse analysis was used to explore particular phrases that the nurses oriented to in their accounts: scene setting, risk assessment, attributing for the suicide. Findings highlight the different, sometimes contradictory, ways the nurses attended to interactional concerns relating to implicit accountability & potential inferences of blame. Results suggest that as a consequence of internalising fundamentally unrealistic expectations regarding suicide prevention, nurses can hold themselves to blame, raising significant concerns around their unrecognized needs for support. (41 refs.)