Grounding co-writing: An analysis of the theoretical basis of a new approach in mental health care

This contribution aims to highlight the theoretical and epistemological premises of the co-writing experience, a practice where a clinician and a patient are mutually engaged in jointly or collaboratively writing a narrative related to the patient's experience. Unlike a typical set of therapeutic techniques, co-writing is based on sharing perspectives and meanings about the experience of crisis, recovery, and the therapeutic process. The paper identifies and briefly describes four non-clinical epistemological paradigms on which it is grounded: ethnography, values-based practice, narrative care, and phenomenology. Although they differ in several ways, at the same time, they seem to share some common features that the paper investigates and comments. For clinicians, nurses, researchers and Mental Health Service managers, attention to the users and to the improvement of their active roles represents not only a strategy for the empowerment of results, but also the access door to a different perspective which relies on a renewed conceptualization of the mental disease nature that may lead to overcoming the epistemic asymmetry between the 'expert' and the 'other' in favor of intersubjective dialogue.