Books & Book Chapters by Richard Lakeman

Where available click on the book picture to purchase.

Stabilization approaches that empwer

Stabilization Approaches That Empower Clients Through Mental Health Crises

Lakeman, R. (2023). Fools Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Stabilization and Psychotherapy. In I. Logan & C. A. Green (Eds.), Stabilization Approaches That Empower Clients Through Mental Health Crises (pp. 1-10). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8228-2.ch001

This chapter builds on others and proposes that stabilization ought to be the first imperative in psychotherapy and a primary focus of all encounters with mental health services. Readers are invited to reframe treatment resistance, treatment failure, and
‘dropouts’ from therapeutic programmes as largely a failure achieve stabilization prior to or in the early phases of psychotherapy. This entails the provision of basic human needs, safety, and facilitating a sense of safety within the psychotherapeutic relationship

Nursing in Australia

Nursing in Australia :
Nurse Education, Divisions, and Professional Standards

Lakeman, R., Graham, I., Nuzum, L., Russ, D., & Van Vorst, S. (2020). Nursing and Acute Mental Health Settings. In N. Wilson, P. Lewis, L. Hunt, & L. Whitehead (Eds.), Nursing in Australia: Nurse Education, Divisions, and Professional Standards (pp. 117-127). Routledge.

This chapter will offer the reader:

 Insight into the history and current context of responding to acute mental health and behavioural disturbances in Australian Health Services
 An overview of crisis theory and how psychosocial crisis manifests in emotional and behavioural dysregulation
 An outline of common mental health and related problems and how they manifest in presentations to Emergency and Crisis Services
 A discussion about the complexities involved in responding to suicidal and self-injurious behaviour.
 Discussion about the purpose of Mental Health Acute Inpatient Units and their place in the continuum of care for people presenting with acute mental health issues
 An overview of current challenges, concerns, and competing discourses that impact on service responses to people with acute mental health issues.

Introducing Mental Health Nursing - A Service user-orientated approach

Introducing Mental Health Nursing: A Service User-Oriented Approach

Happell, B., Cowin, L., Roper, C, Lakeman, R., & Cox, L. (Eds). (2013) Introducing Mental Health Nursing: A Service User-Oriented Approach (2nd Edition). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin

Introducing Mental Health Nursing offers a systematic overview of both the science and the art of caring for people experiencing mental health problems. It addresses the attitudes, knowledge and skills required to provide care for service users across all health care settings, from specialist mental health services to general hospitals and community care.

The authors place the service user at the centre of all aspects of mental health care and emphasise the importance of the therapeutic relationship as the cornerstone of good mental health nursing practice. Emphasis is placed on the role of the nurse as an intrinsic member of the mental health team, and nurses are encouraged to think critically about the perspectives that they bring to their practice

European Psychiatric / Mental Health Nursing in the 21st Century

European Psychiatric / Mental Health Nursing in the 21st Century

Lakeman, R. (2018). The Withdrawn or Recalcitrant Client. In J. C. Santos & J. R. Cutcliffe (Eds.), European Psychiatric/Mental Health Nursing in the 21st Century: A Person-Centred Evidence-Based Approach (pp. 479-492).  Springer International Publishing.

There are few groups who raise the anxiety of health professionals more than those who don’t improve as expected, who don’t follow recommendations or who fail to engage with them in a respectful or cooperative way. Main (1957, p. 129) suggested that the sufferer who frustrates a keen therapist by failing to improve is always in danger of meeting primitive human behaviour disguised as treatment. He observed that nurses would only give a sedative when they were unable to stand the patient’s problems without anxiety, impatience, guilt, anger or despair; whatever their justification for the treatment. Today the reluctant, recalcitrant or a-motivated service user is at risk of coercion and increasingly desperate and frequently non-evidence based treatment measures... 


Cutcliffe, J. R., Stevenson, C., & Lakeman, R. (2018). Oxymoronic or Synergistic: Deconstructing the Psychiatric and/or Mental Health Nurse. In J. C. Santos & J. R. Cutcliffe (Eds.), European Psychiatric/Mental Health Nursing in the 21st Century : A Person-Centred Evidence-Based Approach (pp. 13-27). Springer International Publishing. 

Clinical Nursing Skills: An Australian Perspective

Clinical Nursing Skills: An Australian Perspective

Lakeman, R. & Kunst, E. (2016). Medication Administration (pp 247-278) In Clinical Nursing Skills: An Australian Perspective. Sydney: Cambridge University Press

This chapter will address the competencies needed to administer medication by the most common routes. Medications affect the body in different ways. They have a specific desired (therapeutic) effect, but they can also have unwanted side-effects, and even life-threatening adverse effects and unpredictable interactions with other medications. Nurses therefore need to be familiar with the expected effects of any medication they administer, and recognise and be prepared to address any unexpected adverse effects. The particular forms of medication administration addressed in this chapter are oral, topical, injections, intravenous therapy and blood transfusions. Finally, dealing with adverse events and anaphylaxis is addressed.

Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence Based Practice

Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence Based Practice

Woods, M., & Lakeman, R. (2016). Ethical and legal issues in research. In Schneider, Z., Whitehead, D., LoBiondo-Wood, G., & Haber, J. (Eds). Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence Based Practice – Australian & New Zealand Edition. (5th ed., Edition, pp. 33-52). Chatswood: Elsevier

Martin woods was one of my tutors when I undertook my first undergraduate degree. It was a delight and a privilege to be invited to collaborate in reviewing and re-writing this chapter.

Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing: The Craft of Caring

Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing: The Craft of Caring 

Lakeman, R. (2003). Ethical issues in psychiatric and mental health nursing. In P. Barker (Ed.), Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing: The Craft of Caring. (pp. 504-514). London: Arnold..

Psychiatric Nursing: Ethical Strife

Psychiatric Nursing: Ethical Strife

Lakeman, R., & Curzon, B. (1997). Society, disturbance and mental illness. In P. Barker & B. Davidson (Eds.), Ethical Strife (pp. 26-38). London: Arnold.

This chapter deals with the construction of dangerousness. It balances intrapsychic and social interpretations of what makes people violent and asks to what extent 'dangerousness' is in the eye of the beholder. It shows what a compromised position nurses are in trying to balance control and care against the backdrop of all sorts of barely compatible pressures and influences: professional, legal, social, political and ethical. Clinical case study material provides specific illustrations of the particular challenges faced by nurses working in the prison setting.

The Philosophy and Practice of Mental Health Nursing

The Philosophy and Practice of Psychiatric Nursing

Lakeman, R. (1999). Commentary on 'Where care meets treatment: common ethical conflicts in psychiatric nursing'. In P. Barker (Ed.), The philosophy and practice of psychiatric nursing (pp. 213-216). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.

Barker’s (1995) article proposes that there is an ethical dimension to the everyday decisions which psychiatric nurses make in everyday practice. Few would argue with this position and this commentary doesn’t. Instead it proposes a complimentary case for values clarification by nurses as the first step to ‘being alive’ to such dimensions. It suggests that the first step in this process is acknowledging, and productively channelling the tension arising from value conflict in everyday practice. It is from such work that nursing can begin to establish substantive practice based moral positions....

Talking Cures: A guide to the psychotherapies for health care professionals

Talking Cures: a guide to the psychotherapies for health professionals


Lakeman, R. (1999). Case Study 4: A cognitive behavioural approach to anxiety. In P. J. Barker (Ed.), Talking cures: a guide to the psychotherapies for health care professionals (pp. 59-64). London: Nursing Times Books..

.... Nursing can be therapeutic in it’s own right and definitions of nursing proposed by nurse theorists (particularly with backgrounds in mental health) hint at, or are explicit about the therapeutic potential of a nursing interaction. To realise this potential nurses draw on a wide range of theory and research, wedded to, and master of no one particular theoretical framework or model....