Strengthening Participatory Practice: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis on the Experience of a Neurodivergence Participatory Research Group.

Psychiatric knowledge does not operate within a linear subject–object schema: diagnostic categories shape the lives, identities, and self-understandings of those classified, and these transformations feed back into institutional practices and research paradigms. Participatory Research (PR) explicitly acknowledges this circular configuration by repositioning “users” as epistemic contributors rather than passive objects of inquiry. Drawing on phenomenological and ethnopsychiatric critiques of objectivism, and scholarship from Critical Psychiatry, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Autism Studies, the work situates PR not merely as a stable methodological innovation, but: 1) as a response to the historically asymmetric constitution of psychiatric authority, and to the important roles played in the discipline by cultural, ethical, social factors in shaping its objects, methods, goals; 2) more concretely, as a way to redirect research towards themes and modalities of inquiry more relevant and suitable for users; 3) as necessarily open-ended and reflexive, as a method - reflecting the recursive nature of psychiatric knowledge and inviting ongoing critical self-interrogation. Said critical self-interrogation is the goal of the thesis. The empirical core of the work investigates the experience of members of a participatory research group, of which the author is also a member, through a structured contextual survey and in-depth, oral, semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire provided descriptive grounding regarding participants roles, relationships to neurodivergence, perceived inclusion, and organizational dynamics. Interviews were analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke), informed by an explicit account of researcher positionality. Findings suggest that the group achieved substantial interpersonal recognition and dialogical openness: participants generally reported feeling listened to and valued. However, the analysis revealed four main thematic tensions: 1) participation as recognition coexisting with internalized epistemic hierarchies; 2) temporal compression and productivity pressures limiting deliberative co-construction; 3) epistemological fractures between technical validation logics and interpretive experiential knowledge; and 4) structural fragility linked to organizational instability and less-than-optimally-inclusive communication means and infrastructures. In general, these themes reinforce the perspective that participatory inclusion does not automatically dissolve automatic/implicit authority structures: the redistribution of epistemic power requires not only dialogical openness, but also the development, as a group, of epistemic self-awareness and infrastructural, temporal, and material reconfigurations. The tensions that emerged, rather than being framed as criticisms, were proposed to the group (which is still active) as occasions for operational improvements of the group itself, thus representing for the research project a concrete moment of self-correction from which the expected benefits will equally and concretely benefit users, clinicians, and professional researchers involved.