tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18614557.post4090334976054669227..comments2024-03-20T07:22:58.096+00:00Comments on Relational psychiatry: Can clinical psychology be an antidote to biological reductionism in psychiatry?DBDoublehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16140020984190294123noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18614557.post-55429115888997563132020-08-01T11:58:08.844+01:002020-08-01T11:58:08.844+01:00Hi Richard,
on 'the reductionist psychology w...Hi Richard, <br />on 'the reductionist psychology which breaks down a person's suffering into individual experiences and 'cognitions' etc', I guess you are referring to the CBT if I am right. Please note that the founder of CBT is Aaron Beck who is a psychiatrist. CBT has been the predominant therapy in clinical psychology education which seems to be frown upon by many due to its mechanistic nature and its poor clinical utility amongst those who are less psychologically-minded. <br />My 2 cents.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18614557.post-27571184014074598782020-08-01T11:53:19.360+01:002020-08-01T11:53:19.360+01:00Richard, thanks for your comment.
Both psycholog...Richard, thanks for your comment. <br /><br />Both psychological and biological reductionisms can be fatal in alleviating people's mental health distress effectively in the long run. <br /><br />On your comment, I think this depends on whether the clinical psychologists are exposed to critical psychology and community psychology, which critically examine the perspective and practice of clinical psychology and take on a context-centred, trauma-informed approach to mental health distress, and assimilate them into their clinical practice. <br /><br />Moverlovernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18614557.post-83894076776327708502020-03-19T19:36:24.278+00:002020-03-19T19:36:24.278+00:00I tend to agree, Richard. For example, i criticise...I tend to agree, Richard. For example, i criticised Richard Bentall for his book <i>Madness Explained</i> for seeking to fix mental health practice in a symptom-orientated approach. The point is that mental health practice needs to be focused on the person (see <a href="https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/maybe-not-definitive-critique-psychiatry" rel="nofollow">my review</a>).DBDoublehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16140020984190294123noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18614557.post-31431182341194101162020-03-18T10:26:33.687+00:002020-03-18T10:26:33.687+00:00A major worry I have about clinical psychology is ...A major worry I have about clinical psychology is that it too often pushes a form of psychological reductionism as an antidote to biological reductionism. What I have in mind, in particular, is how clinical psychologists often urge that we attend to individual symptoms and ignore the general gestalts (i.e. 'mental illnesses') in which they arise. Or how they take incredibly seriously the kinds of operationalisation of mental disorders touted by manuals like the ICD and the DSM - operationalisations which in effect try to turn all mental illnesses into syndromes - and then reject such diagnoses (for perfectly good reasons given their initial assumptions). Furthermore they immediately assume that psychiatric talk about 'illnesses' is inexorably to be understood in biomedical terms and so must be rejected. What we might call the humanism underlying 'illness' talk (i.e. how it is rooted not just in bodily dysfunction but in human experience and human values), the moral and psychological and legal value of the extrapolation of the 'illness' concept from the physical to the mental domain, all of this is lost to the psychologists' purview. It seems to suit psychologists' agenda to view the entirety of psychiatry through the lens of bioreductionist psychiatry. But what we so often get in its place is reductionist psychology which breaks down a person's suffering into individual experiences and 'cognitions', with the only thing left to bind them together being the external relations (the arrows) between separate relata (the boxes) in the psychologist's formulations of individual's suffering. Completely missing, now, is all that phenomenological psychiatry in particular had to offer: a non-reductive understanding of the quality of someone's whole 'being-in-the-world', the global character of how they 'live' time and how they 'live' their body, the character of that living understanding that precedes all interpretation or representation (the psychologist's favourite categories), everything ontological in short. Also lost now is an understanding of the motivational substructure of thought - how what from one point of view might look like separate, disconnected, symptoms can, from another, manifest the characterological difficulties, general defensive systems, of the patient. The 'illness' concept might, to the contrivedly unwary, seem to invite biomedical reduction, but at least it aims at comprehending the unity of conditions and different forms of struggling to be-in-the-world. Richard Gippshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com