Setting Mental Health Priorities: An Essay in Comparative Social Epistemology

In this paper, I will raise an issue that has been overlooked so far in the philosophy of psychiatry literature regarding the Research Domain Criteria: the fact that the initiative stems from the research priorities of the National Institute of Mental Health and that the focus of the latter does not address certain aspects of patient conditions which are deemed essential by the patients themselves. Having demonstrated the existence of this problem, I will try to see how it could be avoided. To do so, I will consider a European program this time, the Roadmap for Mental Health Research in Europe and its method for integrating a diversity of voices, including those of patients, into the process of setting research priorities. I will thus engage in an exercise of comparative social epistemology by showing how certain organizational characteristics of one of the programs possess epistemic virtues that are lacking in the other and how greater epistemic justice could be obtained through the implementation of certain mechanisms that allow the voice of patients to be heard.