Epistemic injustice in psychiatric research and practice

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical work on epistemic injustices as it relates to psychiatry. After describ ing the development of epistemic injustice studies, we sur vey the existing literature on its application to psychiatry. We describe how the concept of epistemic injustice has been taken up into a range of debates in philosophy of psychiatry, including the nature of psychiatric conditions, psychiatric practices and research, and ameliorative projects. The final section of the paper indicates future directions for philoso phical research of epistemic injustices and psychiatry, con cerning neurocognitive disorders, identity prejudices in psychiatric illness, concepts of epistemic privilege in psychia try, and the prospects for combining phenomenological psy chopathology and epistemic justice. We argue that much remains to be done in the conceptualization of these episte mic injustices and suggest that this future work should be multidisciplinary in character and sensitive to the phenom enology of psychiatric conditions