Neoliberalism has reshaped health and social care in many high-income Anglophone countries, embedding marketisation, managerialism, and individual responsibility as dominant policy logics. Mental health services, historically underfunded and marginalised, have been particularly affected. For mental health nurses in the UK, who constitute the largest professional group in these services and are uniquely trained as a distinct field of practice from pre-registration, the consequences have been profound, yet their experiences remain under-examined in the scholarly literature.

This paper offers a critical discussion of neoliberalism's impact on mental health nursing in the UK, situating the analysis within wider international debates. It seeks to illuminate how systemic reforms shape workforce sustainability, professional identity, and care practices, and to provoke dialogue about alternatives.

The paper draws on a critical synthesis of scholarship in sociology, psychiatry, nursing studies, and policy, together with workforce data and national policy reports. It traces the historical trajectory of neoliberal reforms in the UK and their implications for mental health nurses, examining four key themes: the reshaping of services and workforce conditions; the responsibilisation of nurses through resilience and burnout discourses; the exacerbation of inequalities within services and the workforce; and the commodification of mental health and recovery. Comparative insights from Canada, the United States, and Australia provide an international perspective.

Neoliberal reforms in the UK have produced fragmented and underfunded services, managerial oversight, and target-driven cultures that undermine nurses' autonomy and relational practice. Workforce surveys highlight widespread burnout and perceptions of unsafe staffing, while discourses of resilience and self-care shift responsibility for systemic pressures onto individual nurses, contributing to moral distress. Structural inequalities have been intensified, with racialised groups, older people, and marginalised nurses disproportionately disadvantaged. Neoliberal logics have commodified mental health care and reshaped recovery around productivity and employability, creating tensions with the values of nursing. While similar dynamics are evident in other high-income Anglophone countries, the UK's distinct pre-registration model of mental health nursing renders the profession particularly vulnerable to neoliberal pressures.

Neoliberalism undermines the sustainability and integrity of the mental health nursing workforce in the UK. Addressing these challenges requires systemic solutions: policies that value and invest in mental health nurses; education that embeds critical pedagogy; practice that resists commodification and reclaims relational care; and research that centres nurses' voices, inequalities, and collective resilience. By situating the UK experience within broader international patterns, this paper positions mental health nurses not only as subjects of neoliberal reform but also as potential agents of resistance and transformation.