Negotiating epistemic rights to knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories in mental health meetings

Abstract

The chapter examines mental health meetings undertaken as part of the Care Programme Approach context in England. It applies the concepts of epistemic status and rights in analysing the ownership of knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories. The analysis demonstrates how both service users and professionals who are close to service users’ everyday lives display access and ownership to that knowledge. The key finding is that meetings contain both collaborative practices that strengthen service user participation (integration ceremony) and practices that produce epistemic injustice for service users (degradation ceremony).