Joint Decision Making in Mental Health: An Interactional Approach

What makes a decision genuinely shared in a mental health encounter? This research-led volume looks closely at the conversations where decisions take shape, examining how proposals, responses, authority, and participation unfold in practice. Its interactional approach brings the details of talk into focus—not as background to care, but as part of how care and inclusion are negotiated.

Decision making, examined turn by turn

Using discourse and conversation analysis, the chapters study recorded interactions across mental health services. The settings include psychiatric visits, rehabilitation meetings, cognitive behavioral therapy, occupational therapy, and couple therapy. Together, they show why the wording and timing of an invitation, recommendation, or response can matter when clients and professionals are working toward a decision.

Participation, proposals, and resistance

The studies consider client participation from several angles: how professionals construct decisions in rehabilitation meetings, how parents and children’s rights are attended to during pediatric psychiatry visits, and how clients resist proposals or treatment recommendations. Other chapters examine responses to requests for medication changes and the ways written notes can become part of the treatment of a client’s proposal.

Where authority and agency meet

Across these encounters, the book explores how professional authority and client agency are managed in interaction. It also considers how support workers respond to client proposals, how practitioners invite participation, how small-scale activity decisions are made in occupational therapy, and how consensus-based decisions become an interactional standard in mental health rehabilitation.

For readers interested in language and care

This volume will interest researchers and practitioners working in mental health, psychology, psychotherapy, applied linguistics, nursing, social work, and rehabilitation. It is especially relevant to readers who want to study shared decision making through close analysis of real clinical communication rather than treating participation as an abstract principle.

By bringing varied care settings into one conversation, Joint Decision Making in Mental Health: An Interactional Approach offers a detailed scholarly perspective on how decisions are shaped—and whose contributions are taken up—within everyday interaction.