International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry 2025

Members of the Project EPIC symposium at INPP 2025 (from left to right):
Jodie Russell, Matthew Broome, Elisabetta Lalumera and Lara Calabrese 

From the 29th - 31st of May 2025, members of team EPIC attended the 26th annual conference for the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig and delivered a symposium based around core chapters in our recently published, open-access book. The conference involved many parallel sessions with amazing talks from established academics and early-career researchers alike. We've provided a bite-sized summary here of our EPIC symposium.

Panel discussion

The symposium was introduced and chaired by Professor Matthew Broome, project EPIC co-investigator at the University of Birmingham (pictured far right), who introduced the project as a whole as well as some of the background to epistemic injustice and related projects himself and Co-I Lisa Bortolotti have worked on. The latter research involved qualitative investigations into epistemic injustice and voice-hearing and work on enhancing agency in youth mental health.

This lead neatly into the first talk of the symposium by EPIC research fellow Dr Jodie Russell at the University of Birmingham titled "Young People with Psychosis at the Intersection of Identities" (pictured below).

Jodie's presentation

Jodie explained to delegates some of the philosophical thought involving her investigation into epistemic injustice among young people with psychosis. She noted that her population of study are likely to have multiple intersecting identities, many of which may be marginalised. Jodie then introduced the phenomena of "intersectional invisibility" whereby individuals become structurally invisible with respect to one or more of their identities because of the other identities they belong to. This is due to the fact that having other group identities may make you an 'atypical' member of other group identities.

Jodie's hypothesis is that many of her participants are likely to feel intersectionally invisible; she notes that there are various demographic features of the population she's studying that make them unique. For example, the population of Birmingham is ethnically diverse, young and religious compared to the rest of the country. 

The city also has one of the highest incident rates of psychosis, and psychosis itself is over-represented by individuals from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. Moreover, the prevalence of psychosis among young people is relatively small compared to other mental disorders. When it comes to mental health research, then, Jodie suggests that it may be a challenge to recruit these participants and address epistemic gaps when potential participants might see themselves as not belonging in certain epistemic spaces (e.g. at universities, among other young people, or other people with mental disorder).

Lara's presentation

This talk was followed by Dr Lara Calabrese (pictured above), Research Fellow and EPIC Research Assistant at the University of Bologna, who discussed the results of her scoping review on epistemic injustice and dementia and outlined the next steps for her qualitative study. Lara noted that people with dementia are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice; this is because, in part, Lara notes, of the symptoms of dementia themselves. 

Under the traditional view of dementia, many symptoms are understood as meaningless and the result of brain damage rather than, as on the person-centred view, meaningful communications. Lara notes that many people with dementia are not involved in their won care decisions (as in Advanced Care Planning) and the diagnosis might not be communicated directly to the person with dementia themselves. Epistemic injustice, therefore, may interfere with many of the basic rights of people with dementia.

In Lara's scoping review of the topic, she uncovered 5 key themes: 

1. Theoretical models and perspectives that apply epistemic injustice to dementia
2. The exclusion of individuals with later stages of dementia from research
3. Institutional exclusion of certain individuals with dementia as representative of dementia
4. The ethical implications of epistemic injustice for Advance Directives for people with dementia
5. The impact of media representations of dementia

Elisabetta's presentation

The symposium was then drawn to a close with the final talk by Dr Elisabetta Lalumera (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bologna and EPIC project partner. Elisabetta's talk, titled "Ameliorating epistemic injustice with digital health technologies", made the case for the promising use of artificial intelligence to overcome knowledge-based injustice often perpetuated by human clinicians and care-givers. She notes, for example, the use of technologies in healthcare already that have brought patient benefits, such as the use of self-tracking apps. Elisabetta notes, however, that there is still the possibility that technology can perpetuate epistemic injustices (which has been pointed out in the literature). 

Nevertheless, Elisabetta suggests that this might primarily be due to the application of assistive technologies themselves, rather than inherent bias; for example a patient's claims might be undermined because the assistive technology is given epistemic priority over patient testimony by the clinician themselves. She also notes an unequal level of transparency between patient and clinician when assessing the claims of assistive technologies because clinicians are likely to have a better understanding of how the technologies work. 

While much work needs to be done to address implicit biases in the data sets that AI are trained on, AI can nevertheless be a fruitful tool in the way that it is 'rigid' and applies the same criteria to everyone, regardless of gender, race and class. This technology should be used to support and validate, not replace the patient's experience.