Shared decision making (SDM) interventions aim to improve client autonomy, information sharing and collaborative decision making, yet implementation of these interventions has been variably perceived. Using interviews and focus groups with clients and clinicians from mental health clinics, we explored experiences with and perceptions about decision support strategies aimed to promote SDM around psychotropic medication treatment. Using thematic analysis, we identified themes regarding beliefs about participant involvement, information management and participants' broader understanding of their epistemic expertise. Clients and clinicians highly valued clientcentered priorities such as autonomy and empowerment when making decisions.However, two frequently discussed themes revealed complex beliefs about what that involvement should look like in practice: 1) the role of communication and information exchange and 2) the value and stability of clinician and client epistemic expertise.Complex beliefs regarding these two themes suggested a dynamic and reflexive approach to information management. Situating these findings within the Theory of Motivated Information Management, we discuss implications for conceptualizing SDM in mental health services and adapt Siminoff and Step's Communication Model of Shared Decision
Making (CMSDM) to propose a Communication-centered Epistemic Model of SharedDecision Making (CEM-SDM).3The quality of mental health care has been argued to be largely dependent on the quality of client-clinician communication (Priebe & McCabe, 2008), which is critical for accomplishing clinical tasks and improving health outcomes (Alegría et al., 2008;Wissow et al., 2008). The model of shared decision making (SDM) reconceptualizes client-clinician communication (Patel, Bakken & Ruland, 2008) by redefining the terms by which participants come together to make treatment decisions (Drake, Deegan & Rapp, 2010). In a SDM frame, neither clinicians (paternalistic model) nor clients (informed choice model) are singularly responsible for making decisions (Makoul & Clayman, 2006). Instead, decision making is characterized by the exchange of unbiased information (Drake et al., 2010), collaboration (Charles, Gafni & Whelan, 1999) and mutual respect for differing expertise (Deegan & Drake, 2006). Given the centrality of communication in mental health care, we believe the assumptions underlying SDM warrant critical examination.For instance, despite widespread support for SDM, its principles are not uniformly perceived or advocated. Not all clients desire high levels of autonomy (Levinson, Kao, Kuby & Thisted, 2005; Say, Murtagh & Thompson, 2006), and psychiatrists have been found to both value and criticize elements of SDM including the exchange of unbiased information (Seale, Chaplin, Lelliott & Quirk, 2006). To elucidate these discrepancies, we elicited perspectives from clients and mental health clinicians about their experiences making and facilitating medication decisions and about strategies that might suppo...