The use of ‘my side telling’ during history taking in psychiatric consultations

Abstract

Using the method of conversation analysis, this article examines an interactional practice through which psychiatric practitioners exhibit knowledge about their patients’ problems, symptoms, or experiences in psychiatric outpatient consultations. This practice is referred to as ‘my side telling’. The data were from audio recordings of 55 psychiatric outpatient visits to four psychiatrists in China. In the data, the psychiatrists employ ‘my side telling’ within larger sequences of talk where psychiatrists solicit their patients to elaborate on their problems or experiences, treating prior answers of the patients as unsatisfactory. Based on empirical study of the data, it is argued that ‘my side telling’ in psychiatry is not merely used to elicit information. Rather, through facing patients with facts or evidence which the psychiatrists got from other sources, it acquires a confrontative function and may be employed as a tool to test the patients’ sense of reality and willingness to talk about their experiences. Thus, it is shown to work towards assessing patients for possible psychiatric conditions and forming diagnostic hypotheses. I further argue that ‘my side telling’ allows the psychiatrists to achieve a balance between respecting the patients’ rights to report their own experiences and influencing the directions in which the information is reported.