Imperfect Cognitions

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team provided some evidence of epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and Lisa Bortolotti discuss a new approach to protecting the sense of agency of young people meeting a crisis team for mental health problems. Clara Bergen Lisa Bortolotti In our project, we wanted to ask: How can practitioners avoid undermining a young person’s sense of agency in a mental healthcare encounter? We adopted an absolutely unique analytic approach to find out the answer. “We” are a group of six experts in philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, clinical communication, clinical practice, and public involvement in research (Interdisciplinary Academic Researchers), and five young people aged 17-25 with experience of accessing mental health services for diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, ma...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team explained why young people may have heightened risks of experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and  Rose McCabe  provide evidence that young people's sense of agency is sometimes undermined in such encounters. By analysing video recordings of police interactions, courtroom cross-examinations, and political news interviews, researchers have learned a lot about how institutional figures challenge what other people have felt or experienced.  For example, police and lawyers use subtle practices like asking questions that imply inconsistency or implausibility ( Stokoe et al 2020 ), anticipate a compromising response ( Drew 1992) , or imply disagreement ( Jol & van der Houwen 2014 ). Lawyers and political interviewers may take an adversa...