The Patient Researcher: A Manifesto

Definition
A patient researcher is a scholar who engages in academic or scientific inquiry while also living with — or through — a condition that is typically the subject of research. In mental health, this identity holds a unique epistemic position: the patient researcher uses their own lived experience not as background context but as data, method, and insight. Their suffering, survival, medication, resistance, and institutional encounters form the material from which knowledge is drawn.

Principles

1. Embodiment as Method: The patient researcher studies not from above but from within. They understand that knowledge about mental illness must include the mind and body that lives it.
2. Reflexivity as Rigor: Reflexivity is not a weakness but a methodological strength. Patient researchers do not pretend detachment — they account for positionality and emotional truth as integral parts of analysis.
3. Lived Experience as Data: Narratives of breakdown, hospitalization, medication, stigma, recovery, and relapse are treated as legitimate sources of knowledge, not side notes or disclosures.
4. Resistance to Objectification: Patient researchers reject the clinical gaze that renders subjects passive. They reclaim voice, authorship, and agency.
5. Autoethnography as Intervention: Writing oneself is not indulgence — it is intervention. It breaks the silence imposed by systems that want patients compliant and researchers distant.

Vision
The patient researcher destabilizes the binary between the observed and the observer. They insist that the personal is not only political but also methodological. They seek to create a new standard of inquiry — one that does not merely include patients but is led by them.

They write not “about” patients. They write