New EPIC Research Fellow: Introducing Anna Golova

In this post, Anna Golova introduces her existing research, and her new work with EPIC at Birmingham.

Anna Golova

1. What is your main research interest?

I work in the philosophy of psychiatry, and my main research interests concern the relationship between mental illness, identity, and agency. My recent research has focused on the phenomenon of ‘self-illness ambiguity’, which is expressed in questions that people with mental health conditions sometimes ask, such as ‘Is it me or my illness?’, or that others around them might ask, such as ‘Is that their illness talking?’.

I have especially been focusing on ‘agential self-illness ambiguity’, one of the forms of self-illness ambiguity that Roy Dings and I have discussed in two papers, one primarily philosophical, the other more clinically oriented. Agential self-illness ambiguity – at least on the surface – concerns questions of whether certain thoughts, feelings, or actions are attributable to a person or to their mental illness.

I am interested in how we should make sense of such questions and what is at stake in asking and answering them, both in everyday interpersonal relationships and in clinical contexts. My research challenges the assumption that we can or should answer such questions by exclusively attributing thoughts, feelings, or actions either to the person or to their illness. The answer might be ‘both’. Moreover, attributing something to an illness does not, by itself, settle normative questions (e.g., regarding autonomy or responsibility). And sometimes, the underlying concern may not be about drawing a boundary between self and illness at all. Instead, we should investigate the more specific concerns underlying people’s self-illness ambiguity questions. 

2. Why do you think it is important to study epistemic injustice in healthcare?

I find it particularly important to study the connections between self-illness ambiguity and epistemic injustice in healthcare. One connection concerns clinicians who might unfairly dismiss a service user’s testimony based on the presumption that ‘that’s the illness talking’.

Another connection is that service users’ self-illness ambiguity utterances may sometimes express their own doubts about whether they can trust their epistemic capacities. Such uncertainty may hinder epistemic agency, but asking such questions might also be an important exercise of epistemic agency through critical self-reflection.

Oversimplified assumptions about mental illness as something entirely separate from the person may also constrain service users’ interpretative resources for understanding themselves and their agency. At the same time, philosophers should be careful not to dismiss service user statements such as ‘It’s not me; it’s my illness’ as relying on conceptually confused assumptions about the relationship between mental illness and the self. Instead, taking service users seriously as knowers requires investigating the meaningful concerns (e.g., about responsibility) that might underlie such statements. 

Ultimately, I think that studying these interconnected issues is important for attending to service users’ efforts to understand themselves and be understood by others, as well as for shaping mental healthcare practices in ways that support such understanding. 

3. What are you working on right now?

Having recently submitted my PhD thesis, ‘Mental Illness and the Self: Ambiguity and Agency’, at Oxford, I am currently preparing another of its chapters for publication. In this paper, I argue that many questions about whether someone’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are attributable to the person or their illness are better understood as questions about the person’s agential capacities, especially those relevant to responsibility.

In my new role as a postdoctoral research fellow on project EPIC at Birmingham, I am also beginning to develop research on how the concept of self-illness ambiguity might help us not only identify but also address forms of epistemic injustice in mental healthcare. I am particularly interested in examining how service users’ uncertainty about their own epistemic capacities might interact with the epistemic injustices they may experience in interpersonal and institutional contexts.

I'm excited to explore these questions together with Lisa Bortolotti, Matthew Broome, and the rest of the wonderful EPIC team!

 

Anna Golova is a postdoctoral research fellow on project EPIC at the University of Birmingham. She recently submitted her DPhil thesis ‘Mental Illness and the Self: Ambiguity and Agency’ at the University of Oxford, where she has been based at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. Before this, she completed the BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford. Her research interests lie in the philosophy of psychiatry.