Resisting governance and the production of trust in early psychosis intervention

Trust is vital in mental healthcare where uncertainty and risk prevail and where relationship building is central to effective service delivery. Despite its significance, research on trust, particularly among multi-disciplinary healthcare teams and between service providers and users is limited and explored only tangentially within early psychosis intervention (EPI) programs. An institutional ethnographic approach is used to examine how trust within an EPI setting is produced and operates. Drawing on participant observation, textual analysis of clinic documents and in-depth interviews with 27 participants (staff, young people and family members), our analysis outlines how the clinic manager's and staff's resistance to hospital rulings that impeded EPI policy principles were part of the extended sequence of activities that produced trust. These acts of resistance, alongside the clinic manager's reflective leadership practices, cultivated spaces for staff to take risks, share their ideas and build consensus - culminating in staff-designed protocols that produced trust among one another, and between service providers and young people and their families. Drawing from Brown and Calnan's framework of “vicious” and “virtuous” cycles of (dis)trust, we highlight how management and staff responses to vulnerability and uncertainty generated trust through their communication practices and knowledge sharing. We also suggest that protocols to manage the risk of medication non-adherence and treatment dis-engagement among young people contained regulatory functions, pointing to the complex interplay of trust, control and risk. Study implications suggest shifting the emphasis from risk management and quality governance as an organizing framework in mental health to a framework based on trust.