Manchester Online Seminars on Evidential Pluralism: Evidence, Outcomes, and the Logic of Care in Youth Mental Health Services.
| Dates: | 23 April 2026 |
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| Times: | 11:00 - 12:30 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Isabel Hanson |
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Randomised controlled trials are central to claims about effective mental health interventions, yet their assumptions rarely hold in youth mental health services, where interventions are not stable, mechanisms are not isolatable, and delivery is adapted contextually to each young person. Drawing on in depth case studies of three youth mental health hubs in England, I show how outcomes emerge through relational practices, contextual dynamics, and young people’s movement through interconnected system of support rather than from any single standardised programme.
I outline how epistemic uncertainty about the causes of youth mental distress complicates mechanistic accounts of evidence and contrast the relational logic of care that guides these services with the logic of evidence embedded in standardised outcome measures.
I conclude by examining the implications for evidential pluralism and for the translation of evidence into policy, including the need for evaluation at the level of the service, the risks of metric driven practice, and invite discussion of opportunities for researchers and philosophers to communicate this complexity to funders and governments seeking reassurance of national level accountability and impact.
All welcome! Please register for a meeting link from the MOSEP webpage (under More Information).
Speaker
Isabel Hanson
Organisation: University of Oxford
Travel and Contact Information
