“What Do You Think?” Interactional Boundary-Making Between “You” and “Us” as a Resource to Elicit Client Participation

: Paananen Jenny, Lindholm Camilla, Stevanovic Melisa, Valkeapää Taina, Weiste Elina

: Lindholm C, Stevanovic M, Weiste E

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

: 2020

: Joint Decision Making in Mental Health

: The Language of Mental Health

: 978-3-030-43530-1

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43531-8_9

: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/1ed6f3ac-2266-4a64-9d2d-4e4aaae67ee8

Communal ideologies related to psychosocial rehabilitation operate on a premise that recovery from illness can be promoted by reducing power differentials between clients with mental illness and support workers. Thus, ideally, clients and support workers should work side by side as “us.” Here, our focus is on instances when the support workers at a Finnish Clubhouse explicitly distinguish the clients from themselves. Drawing on group discussion data, we analyze support workers’ proposals that contain second-person plural reference forms. We show that these forms appear exclusively when the clients are asked to share their opinions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the temporary categorization of clients as an outgroup separate from the support workers attracts the clients’ attention and invokes their responsibility to contribute to the decision-making interaction.