Can Expertise Be about Values? on the Roles of Patients’ Perspectives in Psychiatric Epistemology

In this commentary on & Scedil;erife Tekin's book Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for a Humanist Science, I explore the following question: does Tekin's conception of expertise by experience capture all the areas of expertise that patients can have? To do so, I first reconstruct Tekin's argument regarding the idea that patients are experience-based experts and show how it fits into the broader view that psychiatry should aim for a social form of objectivity. I then draw on two theoretical frameworks from feminist philosophy of science - social objectivity (the one endorsed by Tekin) and feminist standpoint theory - to reflect further on patients' roles in knowledge making practices in psychiatry. I question whether the additional patients roles revealed by social objectivity and feminist standpoint theory correspond to the concept of expertise used by Tekin. I close by further reflecting on the concept of expertise itself and on why it is seen as a powerful tool for considering the important integration of patients into psychiatric epistemology.