What Changes When We Shift Perspective?
Mental health professionals inevitably meet patients through particular clinical frameworks: diagnoses, assessments, treatment models and ideas about what constitutes progress. But patients do not simply enter these frameworks. They interpret them, negotiate them, resist them - and sometimes come to understand themselves through them.
Drawing on qualitative research, my own clinical experience, and fieldwork on encounters between mental health professionals and psychiatric patients, this lecture explores what becomes visible when we shift perspective and examine psychiatric practice from patients’ points of view. Through empirical examples, we will look at how patients navigate diagnoses, professional knowledge and expectations about being a “good” patient, and how seemingly ordinary clinical encounters may shape identity, agency and possibilities for action.
The webinar invites practitioners to reflect on a deceptively simple question: What might we notice about our own practice if we try to see it from the other side of the clinical encounter?