Abstract: 'No suicide contracts' take the form of a 'guarantee of safety', along with a 'promise' to call specified persons if the suicidal ideation becomes unmanageable for the person concerned. They are commonly used in community crisis situations with suicidal people in New Zealand. This article describes and analyses the use of 'no suicide contracts' in these settings. It is argued that the theoretical base (transactional analysis) of the 'no suicide contract' is likely to be deleterious in the community crisis situation.

Abstract: This interpretive inquiry explores the lived experience of 3 undergraduate nursing students and one midwifery student who have panic attacks. The aim of the research is to give voice to these students and to raise awareness among nurse educators about the impact that panic attacks may have for them. The research question asks, “what is the lived experience of panic attack in undergraduate nursing students?” A semi structured interview was conducted with each student in order to gain significant data. The research identified four key themes implicit to the lived experience of panic attack analysis: Listen to the beat of my heart (embodiedness), fearfulness, shamefulness, and holding one's own (coping). The findings suggest that the lived experience of panic attack is embedded in the lifeworld of lived body, lived time, lived relation, and lived space. Panic attack affects students physically and emotionally and interpersonally. The significant finding is that nurse educators need be aware of the coping or non-coping strategies used by students and, most importantly, recognise the impact that panic attacks have on their study.

Abstract: This study explores the archetypal dimension of nursing reality in nurses' stories through a window of nurse-nurse relations. The thesis argues the existence of the unconscious psyche and its importance for nursing, and the study unfolds a methodology that attends to unconscious processes and is congruent with analytical psychology and its practice. It is a two strand inquiry informed by general hermeneutics and Jungian thought engaging a synthetic interpretive methodology using interweaving intellectual and imaginistic processes. In the first strand of the inquiry five female registered nurses share their individual stories which become the text for a nursing narrative that reveals the what-is of nursing reality in essences of Story and Kinship, and a Lifeworld undermined by high levels of Stress. In the second strand of the inquiry the researcher engages imaginistic process to access the archetypal dimension of the nursing narrative, resulting in a sub text from which archetypal images emerge to reveal the more-than of nursing reality. The emergent images are amplified to reveal their symbolic meanings, and their connection to the nursing narrative is explored. An interpretation that is consistent with analytical psychology is offered in a synthesis of the material arising from the nurses' stories and the imaginistic process. The author notes that this synthetic understanding is teleological in nature and directs attention to the need for nursing to grow a differentiated consciousness that is honouring of the feminine principle in the psyche in contradistinction from an overweaning masculine patriarchal consciousness that compromises the nursing endeavour.