Conversational pressures at work: professional roles and communication in mental healthcare settings

Abstract What do we owe to each other when communicating? One area where these questions become immediately relevant is that of mental healthcare settings. Mental healthcare relies heavily on communication with patients/clients. However, it has been argued that patients/clients in mental healthcare settings are often vulnerable to various forms of epistemic injustice, e.g., by not being listened to, not being taken seriously, not being considered as a source of knowledge by healthcare professionals (e.g., Crichton et al., 2017; Scrutton, 2017; Kurs & Grinshpoon 2018; Kidd, Spencer& Carel 2023). The paper investigates normative aspects of communication in settings where interlocutors occupy specific social and professional roles . I focus on the conversational pressures account, recently proposed by Goldberg (2020), and communicative interactions in mental healthcare settings, where issues of epistemic injustice and deficient communication are of great importance. I suggest that professional roles in mental healthcare settings have an impact on the normative evaluation of interlocutors, as well as the conversational pressures they are under. I discuss whether and to what extent ethical and epistemic features of the social and professional contexts can be seen as providing a direct normative source for conversational pressures. I close by sketching a map of issues that require further investigation.