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ISPS-US 23rd Annual Conference | November 1-3, 2024 | University of Pittsburgh & Duquesne University | Pittsburgh, PA & Hybrid Online | Preliminary Schedule
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Re-imagining the ‘Risk Assessment and Management’ of Psychosis in Mental Health Services from Lived Experience Perspectives (Hybrid)
Sunday November 3, 2024 11:30am - 12:30pm EST
Union Ballroom
Whilst international guidance suggests that service users should be involved in safety planning, service users report that they are unaware of, uninvolved in, and ill-equipped for risk assessment and management across all mental health service settings.

What dynamics are at play which explain why ‘mad and risky’ individuals (often labeled as having psychosis/schizophrenia) are not truly heard in professional risk assessment practice in mental health services?
This presentation will begin by briefly describing a critical ethnography that was conducted on one acute psychiatric inpatient unit in the UK. Key findings were that, whilst individuals were wanting to share their ‘experiential knowledge’ of their inner world, they were uninvolved in risk-discussions largely because processes of gathering ‘clinical knowledge’ (e.g., observations and documentation) of risk were hidden from them.

Two ethnographic case studies will illuminate dynamics as to how experiential knowledge is downplayed, dismissed, and marginalised (epistemic injustice) in risk assessment and management of psychosis – via the dismissal of unique fears/threats (as ‘mere delusions’) and via other ‘unacceptable’ expressions of testimony. Other examples will be given from my own lived experience of being risk assessed, which shed further light on these dynamics.

To truly reimagine psychosis services and systems, these knowledge/power/attitudinal dynamics must be transparently addressed. I will argue that clinicians need: to critically examine the naïve positivistic assumptions underpinning their own knowledge regime in assessing risk; to realise the biases, subjectivities, and emotional value-judgements embedded in their own risk practice; to understand that the Mad can only truly be heard when their testimony and meaning-making are understood as knowledge; and to unpack what co-production means, to ascertain what is actually achievable in the context of producing collaborative safety plans within these current dynamics.
Speakers
avatar for Andrew Grundy, PhD

Andrew Grundy, PhD

University College London
Dr Andrew Grundy is a Senior Lived Experience Research Fellow, and Deputy Director and Lived Experience Researcher Lead at the Policy Research Unit for Mental Health, University College London, UK. He is also a Lived Experience Researcher in the School of Health Sciences, University... Read More →
Sunday November 3, 2024 11:30am - 12:30pm EST
Union Ballroom
  Breakout Session, Hybrid

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New Beginnings: Reimagining Psychosis Services & Systems in the US
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