Nursing Erasure: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Series Painkiller

Tiina Ranta; Simon Adam

doi:10.25071/2291-5796.189

Authors

Tiina Ranta York University, PhD Candidate https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7447-8525
Simon Adam York University, Associate Professor https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3043-3013

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/2291-5796.189

Keywords:

Critical discourse analysis, Nursing Ethics, opioid crisis, Media Representation, Professional Complicity

Abstract

This article examines the absence of nurses in the Netflix series Painkiller and the ethical implications of their omission in narratives of the opioid crisis. For the purpose of this analysis, the "opioid crisis" refers to a severe and urgent public health challenge characterized by widespread preventable harm, including the significant loss of quality of life and lives, resulting from the use and misuse of opioids. While the series highlights pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and families, it excludes nurses, even though nurses have played key roles in both resisting and enabling overprescription, as well as in promoting opioids as pharmaceutical representatives. Using Fairclough’s (1989) Three-Dimensional Model for Critical Discourse Analysis, this study explores how the erasure of nurses reflects broader societal perceptions of the profession and complicity in systemic healthcare issues. Drawing from regulatory reports, academic literature, and documented cases of unethical pharmaceutical conduct, the analysis reveals how media discourses obscure nurses’ contributions and associated ethical responsibilities. This absence indicates gendered undervaluation, professional disengagement, and moral injury. The article calls for greater accountability within nursing and urges more accurate, ethically engaged portrayals in media to support structural reform and justice in healthcare.

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Author Biographies

Tiina Ranta, York University, PhD Candidate

Tiina Ranta is a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing at York University. Her research is situated at the intersection of harm reduction, critical posthumanism, and affirmative ethics. She seeks to unsettle humanist assumptions within harm reduction practice while imagining alternative, relational approaches to care and community well-being.

Simon Adam, York University, Associate Professor

Simon Adam is a queer Arab/Assyrian (Syria born) researcher, educator, activist, and theorist. His overarching interests lay in the examination and understanding of contemporary oppression and violences waged against what is constructed as "the Other," by the psy dsiciplines. Focally, his work aims to locate escape and freedom from psy capture and theorize avenues of rupture from intersecting oppressions (racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, sanism) with psy apparatuses.

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