Wednesday, 5 February 2020 at 10:30 am – Wednesday, 5 February 2020 at 7:00 pm
Experts by Experience: Challenges and Prospects for Mental Health Research Methodology
INPP 2020: 22nd Conference of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry
Joint meeting between the MMU Mental Health Research Group and the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP)
Date: Wednesday 5th February 2020
Time: 10.30am – 7pm
Location: Manchester Metropolitan University, John Dalton Building, Chester Street, Manchester, M1 5GD
Tickets: Free - Available on Eventbrite
Experts by Experience are people who have personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses health, mental health and/or social care services that we regulate. How do people with lived experience contribute to scientific knowledge? Reflection on these under-theorized, non-standard cases can play a role in revealing features of subjectivity that are essential to a developed understanding of what is involved in agency, ownership and growth in mental health research. We hope that the conference will open up a dialogue about the ways we might think and argue differently about the implicit or assumed able-ism of current models and measures of ‘value’ and of particular concepts of empowerment, flourishing, health and wellbeing and the benefit of narrative in these contexts.
The concept of expertise by experience raises wider opportunities for stakeholders to take a more active part in patient-led mental health research. Such research may include conventional forms of objective knowledge such as randomised controlled trials or bench mark science. More specifically, patients bring experiential knowledge—the subjective, lived-body knowledge of what it is like to live with a particular illness or condition. How does it feel to be you acting in the world? And what happens when such a feeling is disrupted, ascribed to you by someone else or conferred upon something else? The conference will address these complicated, regularly ignored questions, along with the more abstract and fundamental question of how philosophical research provides knowledge in re-engineering processes for including the patient voice to inform scientific advancement in tackling societal challenges facing community psychology and the increasing demands for meaningful humanistic health and care in mental health awareness.