A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery
requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship
based on mutual trust.
In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail Gosselin uses her personal
experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often
overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with
psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows
how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy
through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual
trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining
their agency and autonomy--specifically, by giving testimony,
constructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making
choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life
activities.
Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes
what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatment.
In addition to mutual trust, she says, a productive therapeutic
relationship requires the clinician's empathetic understanding of the
patient's experiences and perspective. She also explains why psychotic
patients sometimes feel ambivalent about recovery and struggle to stay
committed to it. The psychiatric ethics issues she examines include the
development of epistemic agency and credibility, epistemic justice, the
use of coercion, therapeutic alliance, the significance of choice, and
the taking of responsibility. Mental Patient differs from
straightforward memoirs of psychiatric illness in that it analyses
philosophic issues related to psychosis and recovery, and it differs
from other books on psychiatric ethics in that its analyses are drawn
from the author's first-person experiences as a mental patient.
