‘I was just gobsmacked’: Care workers’ responses to BBC Panorama’s ‘Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed’; invoking mental states as a means of distancing from abusive practices

Abstract

This paper draws upon discourse analytic techniques and discursive psychology to examine how care workers build accounts of viewing the BBC Panorama programme "Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed" which graphically documented the abuse of people with learning disabilities in a residential care setting. 56 interviews were conducted as part of a project concerning adult safeguarding. The analysis considers how careworkers report their reactions and the interactional strategies they use to construct themselves as shocked and disbelieving and thus, as oppositional to the extreme practices in the programme. Their role as careworkers, and therefore as 'insiders' of the industry that allowed such abuse to happen, makes matters of stake and agency live issues for this particular group; and constructions of 'shock' and 'disbelief' are potential ways for participants to distance themselves from the abuse shown in the programme.More broadly, these data show how the invocation of mental states contributes to the management of other discursive business, namely, that of fending off any association with the aforementioned extreme practices.

Detection and prevention of abuse of adults with intellectual and other developmental disabilities in care services: A systematic review

“…Perhaps due to the sensitive nature of the topic, most researchers focusing on the abuse of adults with intellectual and other developmental disabilities have taken a qualitative approach to their research, including five studies that were rated a maximum of 5*. Authors of three of these studies conducted interviews with staff (Fyson & Patterson, 2019; Parley, 2010; Patterson & Fyson, 2016) and authors of one study recruited consumers identified as part of a class action lawsuit on behalf of adults identified as having ‘mental retardation’ and inappropriately residing in a state psychiatric hospital (Ahlgrim‐Delzell & Dudley, 2001). The final study rated 5* used secondary data to examine the conclusions and recommendations reported in executive summaries of adult serious case reviews to ascertain common and diverse themes using thematic analysis methodology (Aylett, 2016).…”

Depression, rational identity and the educational imperative: concordance-finding in tricky diagnostic moments

“…The following analytic sections employ the contemporary interactional-sequence model of DP approach advocated by Wiggins (2017), and as executed in line with the work of Miller and Benkwitz (2016) and Patterson and Fyson (2016). Ideally, the core epistemology of the approach, a non-cognitive empirical stance on social interaction, is largely evident in the discussion of pertinent research advanced above, though a more formal ontological statement on the position can be found, however, in Potter (2010) 6 .…”

“…Given the above, the core aim of this article is to offer a Discursive Psychological (henceforth DP, see Edwards, 2012;Wiggins, 2013;Miller and Benkwitz, 2016;Patterson and Fyson, 2016) perspective on the phenomenon resistance to a depression diagnosis in frontline clinical work. In the service of this, and following a review of currently influential social-cognitive research on the issue (as typified in Tylee and Jones, 2005;Cook and Wang, 2011;Wang et al, 2015;Wimsatt et al, 2015), and allied clinical guidelines (for example, Petit and Sederer, 2006;National Institute for Clinical Excellence, 2016), the assumptions and recommendations therein are then explored with reference to pertinent literature on interaction in healthcare contexts, and particularly during diagnosis and diagnostic reception, emerging from research in DP and the closely-related discipline of Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA, see Maynard, 2006;Peräkylä, 2006;Miller, 2013;Sikveland et al, 2016).…”