ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews theory on how knowledge about mental health is produced in society and how this impacts mental health services, research and professional education in working to uphold particular forms of inequality. Dominant forms of knowledge can lead to culturally available constructions of phenomena that receive acceptance in society at any one time. Examples include codified and reductive knowledge about mental health, produced and replicated through academic research and professional education, that impact on the ways in which mental health services are delivered. We consider what these complex dynamics may hold for the formation and use of experiential knowledge in mental health research, services and professional education. We discuss the many ways that experiential knowledge has been subject to epistemic discreditation and suggest ways of moving forward by re-conceptualising the power of experiential knowledge to invoke resistance to dominant ways of knowing about mental health. We highlight the potential of experiential knowledge as emancipatory discourse, contributing to a change in the way in which knowledge about mental health is produced. We explore the complexity of experiential knowledge as socially situated and shaped by a diversity of identity, experience and other sites of disadvantage or discrimination.
