«It’s not "compressed" at all, it’s pretty free...». A sociological perspective on explanatory pluralism in hearing voices groups In the medical community, the prevailing approach

Journal title WELFARE E ERGONOMIA
Author/s Baptiste Godrie
Publishing Year 2021 Issue 2021/1 Language Italian
Pages 12 P. 78-88 File size 310 KB
DOI 10.3280/WE2021-001008
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In the medical community, the prevailing approach to voices has long been to silence them through medication and not to address the meaning they have for people for fear of fuelling their voices and distress. One of the consequences of this is that people essentially have the terms offered by psychiatry - delusions, hallucinations, symptoms, illness, diagnosis - to talk about their voices, which can have the effect of locking people’s speech into the medical dis-course. In voice hearing groups, people speak again in a safe space among peers and devel-op their own explanations about their voices. The article describes this process which allows for the opening up of a psychological and parapsychological explanatory pluralism of voices. Nevertheless, we emphasize the persistence of medical explanations of voices within these groups because of people’s their long-term socialization to psychiatric language, and the au-thority of medical discourses.

Keywords: hearing voices groups; epistemic pluralism; narrative; mental health; multiple meaning; epistemic injustices

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Baptiste Godrie, «Ce n’est pas du tout "compressé", c’est plutôt libre...». Une perspective sociologique sur le pluralisme explicatif dans les groupes d’entendeurs de voix in "WELFARE E ERGONOMIA" 1/2021, pp 78-88, DOI: 10.3280/WE2021-001008