7 Negotiating epistemic rights to knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories in mental health meetings
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Kirsi Juhila
Abstract
Face-to-face interactions between professionals and service users are central to mental health services. Participants jointly seek, gather, produce and assess knowledge about concerns, risks and troubles that need to be addressed, for example, mental health, financial and interpersonal issues. Social work and health care are often conducted in multi-agency settings and meetings where professionals from different disciplines and service users address each other. In multi-agency meetings, mental health service users are both talked to and talked about, and they also describe their own situations and experiences. This creates a sensitive interactional task for professionals. Professionals need to express such knowledge about the service users that they deem relevant to tackle the issues at hand and make judgements in situations where service users are co-present as listeners, yet also co-producers of knowledge. Producing and using knowledge is bound to epistemic rights, to the ‘distribution of rights and responsibilities regarding what participants can accountably know, how they know it, whether they have rights to describe it, and in what terms’ (Heritage and Raymond, 2005, p 15).
This chapter studies how knowledge of service users’ recent histories and their experiences is produced, presented and used in statutory Care Programme Approach (CPA) meetings in England. The participants in the meetings are service users, their care coordinators, housing support workers and psychiatrists. The analysis displays which participants in this multi-agency interaction epistemically own knowledge about the service users’ recent past. What makes the ownership of this knowledge interesting is that despite dealing with service users’ personal histories, at times it is the professionals who hold this knowledge based on their previous interactions with a particular service user.
Abstract
Face-to-face interactions between professionals and service users are central to mental health services. Participants jointly seek, gather, produce and assess knowledge about concerns, risks and troubles that need to be addressed, for example, mental health, financial and interpersonal issues. Social work and health care are often conducted in multi-agency settings and meetings where professionals from different disciplines and service users address each other. In multi-agency meetings, mental health service users are both talked to and talked about, and they also describe their own situations and experiences. This creates a sensitive interactional task for professionals. Professionals need to express such knowledge about the service users that they deem relevant to tackle the issues at hand and make judgements in situations where service users are co-present as listeners, yet also co-producers of knowledge. Producing and using knowledge is bound to epistemic rights, to the ‘distribution of rights and responsibilities regarding what participants can accountably know, how they know it, whether they have rights to describe it, and in what terms’ (Heritage and Raymond, 2005, p 15).
This chapter studies how knowledge of service users’ recent histories and their experiences is produced, presented and used in statutory Care Programme Approach (CPA) meetings in England. The participants in the meetings are service users, their care coordinators, housing support workers and psychiatrists. The analysis displays which participants in this multi-agency interaction epistemically own knowledge about the service users’ recent past. What makes the ownership of this knowledge interesting is that despite dealing with service users’ personal histories, at times it is the professionals who hold this knowledge based on their previous interactions with a particular service user.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents vii
- List of figures and tables viii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgements xi
- Introduction 1
- From a collaborative and integrated welfare policy to frontline practices 9
- Examining talk and interaction in meetings of professionals and service users 33
- How chairs use the pronoun ‘we’ to guide participation in rehabilitation team meetings 63
- Working within frames and across boundaries in core group meetings in child protection 83
- Alignment and service user participation in low-threshold meetings with people using drugs 115
- Sympathy and micropolitics in return-to-work meetings 141
- Negotiating epistemic rights to knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories in mental health meetings 171
- Relational agency and epistemic justice in initial child protection conferences 197
- Conclusion 225
- Postscript 241
- Index 247
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents vii
- List of figures and tables viii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgements xi
- Introduction 1
- From a collaborative and integrated welfare policy to frontline practices 9
- Examining talk and interaction in meetings of professionals and service users 33
- How chairs use the pronoun ‘we’ to guide participation in rehabilitation team meetings 63
- Working within frames and across boundaries in core group meetings in child protection 83
- Alignment and service user participation in low-threshold meetings with people using drugs 115
- Sympathy and micropolitics in return-to-work meetings 141
- Negotiating epistemic rights to knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories in mental health meetings 171
- Relational agency and epistemic justice in initial child protection conferences 197
- Conclusion 225
- Postscript 241
- Index 247
