Abstract
People experiencing mental distress and illness are frequently on the receiving end of stigma, epistemic injustice, and social isolation. A range of strategies are required to alleviate the subsequent marginalisation. We ran a series ‘philosophy of mind’ workshops, in partnership with a third-sector mental health organisation with the aim of using philosophical techniques to challenge mental health stigma and build resources for self-understanding and advocacy. Participants were those with lived experience of mental distress, or unusual beliefs and experiences; mental health advocates; and mental health service providers (such as counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists). We draw on a shared perspective as a participant and facilitator of the workshop series to assess their impact. We discuss the following benefits: (i) the opportunity for structured discussion of experiences and models; (ii) dialogue across different mental health backgrounds; (iii) the potential to reduce self-stigma and to increase self-understanding and advocacy; and (iv) the potential to alleviate (some) epistemic injustice. We invite researchers and mental health practitioners to consider further opportunities to investigate the potential benefits of philosophy groups in mental health settings to establish whether they generalise.
Highlights
Mental health stigmaIn this paper, we report on a series of ‘philosophy of mind’ workshops, which were run in partnership with a third-sector mental health organisation during the winter of 2017–2018
We report on a series of ‘philosophy of mind’ workshops, which were run in partnership with a third-sector mental health organisation during the winter of 2017–2018
Following our arguments in the subsections “Philosophy as a means of structuring group discussion” and “Dialogue across different mental health backgrounds”, we suggest that doing philosophy in mixed groups could have the effect of alleviating testimonial epistemic injustice, because mental health professionals will be able to learn from people with lived experience who may offer examples of being on the receiving end of testimonial injustice, such as the experience of Richard Lakeman (2010) summarised in "Background" section
Summary
We report on a series of ‘philosophy of mind’ workshops, which were run in partnership with a third-sector mental health organisation during the winter of 2017–2018. Even if the group does not have access to personal stories like these, mental health professionals still have the opportunity to critically investigate the assumptions underlying mental health practice through engagement with the substantive philosophical content (as described in “Philosophy as a means of structuring group discussion”) Reflecting on this content, such as whether notions of irrationality should be decoupled from notions of pathology, may go some way towards helping participants refrain from devaluing testimony from people with lived experience of mental distress. Following on from the previous subsection, we suggest that philosophy groups have the potential to (somewhat) contribute to restoring hermeneutic epistemic justice for people with lived experience This is because they provide the opportunity to develop a philosophical account of experiences of mental distress which incorporates their deeply meaningful and positive features, rather than focusing only on negative attributes ( drawing on the content of the groups). She reports that thought experiments and the use of concrete examples worked well as a means of opening up the discussion and leading on to the more theoretical models in each individual session
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