Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien (Université Laval) publishes a new article entitled “Can expertise be about values? On the roles of patients’ perspectives in psychiatric epistemology” in the journal Philosophical Psychology.

Abstract

In this commentary on Şerife Tekin’s book Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for a Humanist Science, I explore the following question: does Tekin’s conception of expertise by experience capture all the areas of expertise that patients can have? To do so, I first reconstruct Tekin’s argument regarding the idea that patients are experience-based experts and show how it fits into the broader view that psychiatry should aim for a social form of objectivity. I then draw on two theoretical frameworks from feminist philosophy of science – social objectivity (the one endorsed by Tekin) and feminist standpoint theory – to reflect further on patients’ roles in knowledge making practices in psychiatry. I question whether the additional patients roles revealed by social objectivity and feminist standpoint theory correspond to the concept of expertise used by Tekin. I close by further reflecting on the concept of expertise itself and on why it is seen as a powerful tool for considering the important integration of patients into psychiatric epistemology.