Globally, people in prison often come from the most deprived sections of society due to adverse political, economic, environmental, social and lifestyle factors. This group experiences chronic and complex mental and physical health conditions at higher rates than the general population, including mental health conditions, chronic non-communicable and communicable conditions and acquired brain injury. They also have higher rates of tobacco smoking, high-risk alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and injecting drug use. As many as 90 per cent of people in custody have a diagnosis of either a mental health condition or addiction. Often, people in prison have under-utilised health care in the community and, for many, the first interaction with health services occurs during incarceration. Therefore, incarceration may provide an opportunity to access treatment to improve health and for appropriate health care to be initiated.

Mental illness continues to be a leading cause of illness in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The effects of reduced mental health have significant consequences for individuals, families and the community. Prevention and early intervention are crucial to improve health outcomes. Much of the support and care for individuals and families experiencing mental health illness occurs within the community, and nurses are major providers of that care. This chapter focuses on the role of community mental health nurses in providing recovery-orientated care for individuals living with mental illness and their families.

The last chapter explored how we interpret the raw data from our eyes to perceive meaningful objects and events. In this chapter we explore attention. Like perception, attention seems to be a straightforward mental concept used in everyday life. Just as you could ask someone “did you see that?” without bothering to define “see,” you can ask someone to “pay attention” and expect them to know what you were talking about.

In the previous chapter we considered the process of encoding, emphasizing that it is not accurate to characterize it as the intentional act of learning; rather, it is how experience becomes memory, depending on certain features of our thought at the time. In this chapter, we describe retrieval, the process of bringing a long-term memory back to consciousness. We consider what makes successful retrieval possible and also what might make it unreliable. In many situations, we know we have experienced something (we had a chance to encode it), but when we later have reason to retrieve it, we cannot access the memory.

You may have taken this class thinking, “Oh, boy, now I’ll learn how thinking works and how I can think better. Look out world!” You expected to read about controlling mind wandering, evaluating information, and making good choices. If so, you were understandably perplexed that we’ve spent twelve chapters on topics, such as perception and short-term memory, that you hadn’t thought of as “thinking.” We’ve offered little help to the hopeful super-thinker, and you’ve been a good sport about that. Here, toward the end of the book, we’re going to come through for you. However, as by now you will have guessed, our study of “thinking” will still confound your initial expectations because unconscious processes will loom large.

We began the last chapter by defining attention as continued cognitive processing or continued thought. For the next few chapters, we follow that continued thought in the form of memory. We usually think of “memory” as something we’re aware of, as when you remember which friend is allergic to shellfish or where you parked your car. But we’re going to expand what we think of as memory by imagining a few cases where the time between the event and the memory of the event is so short that we use it without realizing it.

Human language is a magnificently complex cognitive process, integrating many of the processes we’ve already discussed. You must accurately perceive the letters or the sounds. You must link them to the intended memory representations of what those letters or sounds correspond to. Then you must make sense of the piece of language as a whole, in the context of a rich network of memories. Think of what goes unstated in the earlier joke. You must choose a meaning for “cutting” that is not about knives or standing in line but about insults. You must understand that a “clown” is not just a positive role of someone who entertains at children’s birthday parties and is a talented physical comedian in circuses but also someone who is rude or stupid. Finally, you have to see the humor in calling someone rude or stupid, but not so rude and stupid that they become famous for it.

In Chapter 1, we discussed the objections the behaviorists raised to the cognitive program. One of their concerns was the use of nonobservables in theory, for example, creating a theory of how memory works that includes representations such as short-term and long-term memory. No one can actually see or otherwise directly observe short-term memory, so how can we use it to explain human behavior? Cognitivists replied that they were going to use human behavior to test their models. But if so, it seems inevitable that their reasoning would end up being circular. They want to explain how humans behave, yet they plan to test whether the model is right using that same behavior.

In the previous chapter we considered the structure of our memories. What are the different kinds of memories? How are they organized? In this chapter and the next we will focus on the processes that turn experiences into memories and help us recall these memories later. Each chapter describes one of the two basic processes of memory: encoding and retrieval.