Existing challenges to the legitimacy of mental health nursing in the United Kingdom and beyond have stimulated a critical self‐reflection and discourse around the mental health nursing role, forcing the profession to question its identity and critically re‐evaluate its position within the wider healthcare arena. In this discussion paper, I suggest that the current difficulties in conceptualising mental health nurse identity arise from our role being inherently interwoven with distinctive challenges and unique needs of our service users. Emerging from this (...) idea is that the ‘being’ (and the ‘doing’) of mental health nursing is firmly situated within the sphere of intersubjective relations. Drawing upon Hegel's ideas of reciprocal recognitive relations, to support the notion that our profession's role and purpose are better understood when defined in relation to the work that we do with our service users, I argue that it is in the understanding (and even embracing) of intersubjectivity as a core principle of mental health nursing, where we might not just better understand ourselves but also know how to shift asymmetric relations with our service users towards those which are more commensurate and mutually beneficial. (shrink)

Cultural differences between animal groups offer a means of tracing social relationships and cognition through time and across space. Where behaviours include tool use, we can observe the influence of available materials and role models on the development of tool-based activities. Here, we discuss the ways that we can study the social influence of tool-use behaviour in wild primates, focusing on two species that use durable stone tools: bearded capuchin monkeys and Western chimpanzees. We concentrate on durable tools, as these (...) provide an archaeologically recoverable record of activities. However, we also consider the influence of less durable tools when examining behavioural patterns in capuchins and chimpanzees. In order to study abstract concepts like culture and cognition, we identify socially learned behavioural diversity that is not influenced by environmental circumstances. This diversity, when compared among social units, allows us to detect cultural differences. Our bottom-up approach identifies some of the opportunities and challenges in studying social cognition through tool use in wild-ranging primates. (shrink)