Children’s claims to knowledge regarding their mental health experiences and practitioners’ negotiation of the problem

Parents’ constructions of normality and pathology in child mental health assessments

“…In so doing, in these interactions the subject position of a ‘good parent’ and of a ‘normal family’ becomes implicitly challenged by the construct of the ‘problem’ child (O'Reilly et al . ). Hence, the child mental health assessment represents an institutional context where stake is magnified, against the backdrop of complex epistemic gradients, especially in relation to the use of medical language (O'Reilly, Lester and Muskett , Raymond ).…”

“…) and/or risk being positioned as responsible for the problem (Blum , O'Reilly et al . , Patrika and Tseliou ). This is particularly relevant given that it is parents who bring their children to clinics and frequently occupy much of the clinical encounter (Strong ).…”

“…In our previous work, we have used interactional approaches to demonstrate how parents in child mental health assessments work to build a case to persuade a professional that a clinical explanation for the behaviour or characteristics of the child is needed (O'Reilly et al . , ). In this paper, we develop these arguments to demonstrate how parents/carers (henceforth parents) draw on notions of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ in this process.…”

Knowledge displays: Soliciting clients to fill knowledge gaps and to reconcile knowledge discrepancies in therapeutic interaction

“…A central task in therapeutic interactions is to manage the boundary between respecting clients' primary right to voice their own experiences [5] and influencing the ways in which they report those experiences [46]. In the TC meetings examined in this study this tension emerges when the clients fail to share personal information or do so in ways that contradict some previous knowledge.…”

Sharing knowledge and shaping identities in healthcare interactions

“…These include interactions between HPs, patients or clients and accompanying family members [1,2], therapeutic community meetings [3], patient discussion groups led by nurses [4], and patients' meetings with teams of HPs [1,5]. Widening the focus from the doctor-patient dyad to multi-party interactions adds new dimensions to the understanding of knowledge exchange in health care and brings out the complex matrix of knowledge-related identities in these contexts.…”