Reimagining psychiatry

Diana and Nik Rose have a Psychological Medicine article entitled ‘Is ‘another’ psychiatry possible?’. They discuss postpsychiatry (see eg. previous post), Open Dialogue,  the Power, Threat and Meaning Framework (PTMF) (see eg. another previous post) and service user involvement in research in this context. As they say, the leaders of the psychiatric establishment are unlikely to accept “reduction in their claims that they are the exponents of highly effective, neurobiological based, targeted treatment of brain disorders”. 

I’ve always said it’s unrealistic to expect a paradigmatic shift in psychiatric practice because the hope of finding a biological basis for mental illness will never go away completely. But the extent to which it’s understood that this belief is wishful thinking may change. Psychiatry does need to become more open minded, more self-critical and less dogmatic in its beliefs and claims.