Resisting Perceptions of Patient Untrustworthiness
摘要
A beneficial therapeutic relationship between a patient and their clinician requires mutual trust. In order to effectively treat someone, a clinician has to trust the patient’s reports of their symptoms, relevant experiences, medical history, and so on. Many psychiatric symptoms do not have physical markers that can be verified by clinical testing, and thus psychiatrists have to accept more on trust than clinicians treating somatic illnesses. However, many psychiatric diagnoses are stereotypically associated with traits that indicate untrustworthiness (such as irrationality). In this chapter, I illustrate how psychiatric labels can signal stereotypes of untrustworthiness, and how this can have repercussions in clinical contexts. In particular, I show how perceptions of untrustworthiness cause epistemic injustices by unfairly reducing the perceived epistemic credibility of patients with psychiatric conditions.