Challenging a Diagnosis
Psychiatric diagnoses have far-reaching consequences for every area of your life: welfare, employment, health and travel insurance, physical and mental health assessment/treatment, adoption rights, and social stigma, to name but a few. Yet they are just subjective opinions with no scientific basis and can change over time.
The Power Threat Meaning Framework – A critique of a critique
The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a conceptual alternative to the diagnostic model of distress co-produced by psychologists and survivors, has attracted an extraordinary...
‘I’d Rather Die Than Go Back to Hospital’: Why We Need a Non-medical Crisis...
The steering group shared a basic philosophy: a holistic, psychosocial approach to mental health, drawing on social constructionist and feminist ideas, on work highlighting the links between trauma and mental health, and on the service user/survivor movement.
Exploring Identity Through Art
In this ‘identity’ project, we ran a series of workshops exploring different aspects of identity through sculpture, collage, and graphic novel. At the end of each workshop, we gave each group participant the option of sharing their piece with the group and describing both the meaning of the piece and their experience of the creative process.
The Politics of Distress: A discussion with Dr. James Davies on his new book...
Our system fails because it colludes with social structures that themselves generate harmful ways of being in the world. The sector at best sedates these states while at the same time exonerates harmful social arrangements by over-emphasising the so-called internal and disordered causes of structural distress.