Dissertation

Central Theme:

My dissertation seeks to explore epistemic injustices as they appear in psychiatry. Before I introduce my core question, it will first be helpful to make a note concerning some original terminology.

A Note About Language Choices: 

My first endeavor is to establish some unifying language, namely regarding 1) what to call the people who either interact with psychiatrists as patients or whose mental experiences are deemed to be pathological by psychiatrists, and 2) what to call their phenomenological experiences. A necessary consideration factoring into my language choices is ensuring that I am not begging the question. If I, for instance, describe a person’s phenomenological mental experiences as “psychiatric,” I have already implied that such experiences are pathological. 

Given that part of my project is asking who should be involved in deciding experiences are “pathological” or in some way justify seeking psychiatric aid or imposing it upon someone, I want to avoid presupposing that psychiatry has already gotten that right. The same issue presents itself with calling these experiences “symptoms.” Thus, I will simply refer to these experiences as phenomenological mental experiences (hereafter abbreviated as PMEs.)

Nonetheless, it is useful to have language to describe PMEs that psychiatry has deemed to be part of its scope of inquiry and declared pathological or unwell. Hence, we need a term with such reference that does not suggest or specify that PMEs belong to this type on the basis of an intrinsic natural distinction; a term that acknowledges this PME type is, in part, shaped by humans.

In other words, we come to understand these PMEs as “unwell” not just because of facts out there in the world whose truth value is immune to social influence, but also because of our attitudes and practices. Because the evaluation that a PME should or should not be slotted under the “unwell” category does involve considerations over and above static, non-social facts (such as a wavelength), it is important for my terminology to elucidate that fact. Accordingly, I will henceforth refer to such PMEs as psychiatrized PMEs because moving from an adjective (in our case, “psychiatric”) to a verb emphasizes psychiatrists’ active role in crafting this PME subtype. Now that we have established some shared language, I can now introduce my core question.

Core Question:

The core question of my dissertation is this: given that the phenomenological experience(s) of a PM Experiencer impacts their perception, including their perception of their PMEs, what does it mean for a psychiatrist to take a PM Experiencer's testimony seriously? 

Research Goals:

I aim to explore this question both in clinical as well as research contexts.

Further, my dissertation will also explore the question of "testimony about what, precisely?"

My goal is to address three possible spheres: 

1) Testimony about the PM Experiencer's phenomenology

2) Testimony about PME classification

3) Testimony about veridicality; about what is "out there" in the world