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Attending to Parent and Child Rights to Make Medication Decisions During Pediatric Psychiatry Visits

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Joint Decision Making in Mental Health

Part of the book series: The Language of Mental Health ((TLMH))

Abstract

This chapter examines how children diagnosed with ADHD come to participate in medication decisions in pediatric psychiatry visits. Drawing on 45 video-recorded follow-up visits involving 16 families and 14 clinicians, findings show that children infrequently participate during treatment discussions. Clinicians overwhelmingly initiated medication discussions with parents, thus orienting to parents’ deontic authority as decision makers. Six children across 10 visits participated in the treatment recommendation phase and most often by clinician invitation. Clinicians who invited children’s participation prioritized parents’ deontic authority while also attending to children’s deontic rights. More specifically, they employed open-ended Wh-question designs to seek children’s independent assessments (How does that sou:nd.) or perspectives (Well what do you think Sammy.) of a medication recommendation that was already accepted by the parent. This practice reveals how some clinicians work to balance the pressures of attending to both parents’ and children’s deontic rights to make treatment decisions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Lisa Mikesell

  2. Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Lisa Mikesell

  3. Center for Health Services and Society, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    F. Alethea Marti, Michael McCreary & Bonnie T. Zima

  4. Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Geneseo, NY, USA

    Jennifer R. Guzmán

  5. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Bonnie T. Zima

Authors
  1. Lisa Mikesell
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  2. F. Alethea Marti
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  3. Jennifer R. Guzmán
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  4. Michael McCreary
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  5. Bonnie T. Zima
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Correspondence to Lisa Mikesell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Camilla Lindholm

  2. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Melisa Stevanovic

  3. The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland

    Elina Weiste

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Mikesell, L., Marti, F.A., Guzmán, J.R., McCreary, M., Zima, B.T. (2020). Attending to Parent and Child Rights to Make Medication Decisions During Pediatric Psychiatry Visits. In: Lindholm, C., Stevanovic, M., Weiste, E. (eds) Joint Decision Making in Mental Health. The Language of Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43531-8_3

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