‘He sees patients as lesser people’: exploring mental health service users’ critiques and appraisals of psychiatrists in Canada

Abstract

Drawing on 5090 English reviews of 486 psychiatrists working in Canada posted on ratemds.com, this study empirically analyses how Canadian mental health service users critique or appraise their doctors. I explore how the online realm serves as a conduit for resistance and discourses about mental health that otherwise become suppressed by psychiatric power in clinical settings. I found that when doctors did not listen to their patients, make careful attempts to learn about their lives and problems beyond their clinical symptoms, and give them a sense of autonomy, service users felt like an inconvenience. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, who were constructed as kind, compassionate, non-judgemental listeners tended to receive praise from service users. Service users who had this kind of positive experience were more likely to align themselves with the forces of psychiatric power, meaning they believed in their doctor’s power to make decisions about their health.

Keywords:

• Mad Studies
• feminist standpoint epistemology
• psychiatric resistance
• mental health service users
• online research

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Matthew D. Sanscartier for his helpful insights into the article. The author wishes to thank the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program for the funding provided during the second and third year of his doctoral programme.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received funding from Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Like Landry (2017), I am aware of the socially and culturally constructed use of terms such as ‘mentally ill’ and ‘patient’. Using these terms implies knowledge that there is always cooperation between a person and their caregiver, when in reality we cannot assume that each person who experiences mental pain accepts that they are ill, or wishes to be treated in accordance with the established psychiatric diagnoses, treatments, and discourses available. Still, ‘ill’ necessarily emphasizes and acknowledges the need for medical treatment in some cases. With tension remaining, I tend to refer to these people as ‘mental health service users’ because it is a generic and less controversial description of the people who use mental health services. I avoid terms like ‘mental health sufferer’ because this may imply passivity and victim status. While I tend to use ‘service user’, psychiatric survivor is an applicable term for some participants in this study who assert that some forms of psychiatric treatment can be considered abusive.