Drop the Disorder!: Challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnosis

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with the aim of providing a supportive forum for the discussion of all matters related to psychiatric diagnosis, ‘medication’, and medicalization of emotional distress. establishments I can see now how much of my initial confusion and dislocation to the medical process was simply based on a gut feeling and disconnection that has often been hard to quantify or articulate.

This moment has stayed with me for all of my working life because it provoked personal feelings of incompetence, inadequacy, and rejection. I am now able to describe that version of myself to have been a tiny compliant cog within the system. I made my Recovery in (detail removed) in 1984 as a result of (carefully) coming off strong medication with the help of Psychotherapy.Those scary, dehumanising labels and instructions therefore just reinforced and justified my need to be compliant in the denial and irrelevance of the unique social and cultural experience of that individual. Because for me it feels like if we are not careful we might end up moving further away from encompassing a more holistic idea such as recognition of the variety of psychological diversity within all of us.

What then pushed me over the edge was yet another celebrity-inspired media frenzy about a psychiatric “illness. It was February 2016, the UK-EU referendum debate was beginning to warm up and my tolerance for absorbing toxic tweets and frustrating Facebook posts was dwindling fast.Despite all our knowledge about attachment, trauma and relationships, many of my colleagues have ended up colluding with the message that people are “ill. They generally do what they want, they respond to whatever suits them (sometimes public opinion may influence) but much more often it’s the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the progressive image conveyed by British critics of psychiatry (both professionals and survivors), the biomedical discourse in the UK is still deeply embedded in public consciousness and actively promoted in anti-stigma campaigns and media reporting.

finally common sense is on the horizon and a campaign to break down the psychiatric infastructure of 'treating' distress has begun. However, I hope the people involved are arriving from all political worldviews, otherwise it will devolve into just another groupthink, echo-chamber community. I hope it’s not too hasty to say that this book might be one of the most influential on my journey as a counsellor and I’m incredibly grateful to have come across it while still studying.However, I have been moved by the thoughtfulness and warmth people have shown to each other as they share feelings, experiences and dilemmas about working in, and being on the receiving end of, the psychiatric system. However, many, many people never hear or find an alternative to the model that your brain is broken and you need to take drugs indefinitely. She has personal and professional experience, awareness and skills in working with trauma and abuse, dissociation, ‘psychosis’, hearing voices, healing and recovery. And I have confidence that the idea of an alternative language to the medical process can start to filter through.

I am serious about my Funding Request, and hopefully making a contribution to UK Mental Health Recovery. The support and feedback that we've received over the last 8 years is evidence that many people have had enough of the medical model paradigm and that it's time for change.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can work wonders on some people with prolonged bouts of sadness brought on by negative thinking. And “A further barrier to language change may derive from the privileges granted to those who have been given a psychiatric diagnosis. It examines the question of who decides what is normal and why do we perhaps judge and reduce people who are so often going through an authentic, understandable, emotional struggle with trauma? I imagine that professionally this must be like walking a tightrope high in the air with slippers on for therapists (and for the client), but it can be done.