The recognition of “experts by experience”, people with lived experience of illness or of using healthcare services, has grown significantly in medicine, psychiatry, and mental health practice. Their perspectives are increasingly valued in clinical decision-making, service design, and policy-making. Philosophical work on epistemic injustice, situated knowledge, and the role of social identities in knowledge production has provided conceptual frameworks to examine these developments.

The involvement of experts by experience gives rise to genuinely philosophical questions emerging within medicine and psychiatry, while also enriching existing debates in the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry.

While lived experience can enrich knowledge practices and challenge established hierarchies, it can also risk tokenisation, moralisation, or marginalisation if not integrated thoughtfully.

In recent years, several issues have emerged in the literature:

• the epistemic authority of experiential knowledge in different medical and research settings (e.g., doctor–patient interactions, emergency care, or clinical research);

• whether appeals to lived experience reproduce, rather than dismantle, existing asymmetries of power;

• the adequacy of epistemic injustice as a framework to capture the contributions of experts by experience, compared with alternatives such as oppression, recognition, or care;

• ethical concerns of responsibility, vulnerability, tokenism, and exploitation in involving experts by experience;

• whether involving experts by experience in research requires broadening the kinds of evidence medicine recognises (e.g., first-person or subjective knowledge);

• problems of representation within groups of experts by experience, including conflicts of interest and the privileging of certain voices.

In this Focus section of Mefisto, guest-edited by Elisabetta Lalumera and Lisa Bortolotti, we gather contributions that explore the epistemic and ethical dimensions of experts by experience in medicine and psychiatry, their intersections with epistemic injustice, and the promise and limitations of centering lived experience in knowledge practices.

Word limit: 9000 max (excluded bibliography)

Deadline for submissions: 15 dicembre 2026.