Relational psychiatry has a reformist agenda

I said in a previous post that critical psychiatry, in my view, is reformist. I’ve also emphasised in the past (eg. see previous post) that the critical psychiatry movement is a broad church of reformers and revolutionaries. There are significant differences within the movement (see another previous post). In a way, I’ve always made a distinction between my view of critical psychiatry and the critical psychiatry movement as a whole.

I have now moved on to using the term relational psychiatry (see eg. previous post) at least partly because I think the broader radical approach of critical psychiatry has outlived its usefulness. I want to be clear that relational psychiatry does not take an exclusionist view that mental illness does not exist (eg. see previous post). Perhaps in a similar way to which mainstream psychiatry marginalised ‘anti-psychiatry’, there is a danger that ‘the criticals’ are also being marginalised, as, for example, illustrated in Twitter debates. I never have been ‘a critical’ in that sense. 

Nonetheless, relational psychiatry does not see primary mental illness as brain disease. Instead, it provides a framework which focuses on the person and has ethical, therapeutic and political implications for clinical practice.