Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the complex nature of exclusion in mental healthcare and investigates efforts by Re:Create Psychiatry to develop interventions that overcome barriers between mental healthcare professionals and the people who use their services.

Paper long abstract:

Mental healthcare is deeply divided. Some clinicians see it as their duty to provide effective and safe treatments based on clear observations of service-users and high-quality evidence from trials. Other clinicians say this overstates the relevance and authority of research but find their viewpoint largely erased. Service-users often describe a more total exclusion. They are obliged to accept the hermeneutical limitations of the limited clinical lexicon. They are placed in asymmetrical and unreciprocal relationships, with nothing of value to exchange but the disclosure of distress.

Re:Create Psychiatry is a project based in London that seeks to enable medical and psychiatric professionals to better understand and collaborate with people who have lived experience of mental ill-health, and for service-users to in turn better understand medical professionals. To achieve this, they curate discussion groups, creative dialogue workshops, and public events during which service users and professionals come together to share their reflections - and listen to others' - about the contemporary system's virtues and frailties.

Our paper will provide ethnographic material describing the work of Re:Create. We will use theory and anthropological literature to help us understand the complex nature of exclusion in mental healthcare and to think through how exclusion and disability intersect; we assess why it appears so difficult to integrate service-user input into care and try to envisage what genuine dialogue might look like.