Participatory psychiatry refers to a movement that advocates for including patient voices in research about their illness. It is often summarized with the line "nothing about us without us". While there is a lot of writing on the value of including lived experience in philosophy of psychiatry, there is no clear methodology that would allow for this. Our goal is to first conduct a literature review on first-person accounts of mental disorders--neurodiversity & anorexia nervosa--and then work to implement our findings into a new participatory method. This project is in the early stages.
It is clear that the perceptions of diagnosis that patients entering the first episode mood and anxiety (FEMAP) clinic at London Health Sciences Centre have are different now than they used to be. By now, many psychiatrists believe that social media and online news sources are changing the way people see diagnosis. Whereas psychiatrists may wish to downplay the role diagnosis has in treatment, patients often come in with a diagnosis in mind or see diagnosis as a key part of their identity. The current project seeks to validate these suspicions and work to understand how new patients at FEMAP see diagnosis through qualitative interviews.
In March of 2024, the US government moved to ban TikTok on US-based app stores if the parent company, ByteDance, did not sell its US operations to a local company. Politicians have cited a few reasons for the ban that all vaguely focus on cognitive/epistemic security and the threat of foreign interference. However, it's not clear what the problem is that this policy is supposed to solve. Our project is to define that problem using a problem representation analysis. We have collected various sources across academic, media, and policy literature that either argue for or against a TikTok ban and are analyzing the various reasons they cite for the policy. We plan to publish our findings soon and begin a much larger project asking how we protect people's epistemic spaces in a complex and dynamic online world.