Drop the Disorder! Challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnosis

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She has personal and professional experience, awareness and skills in working with trauma and abuse, dissociation, ‘psychosis’, hearing voices, healing and recovery. This book is packed with rich narratives, incisive analysis and powerful critiques of a world where everyday emotions are increasingly seen as disease. 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? Therefore, until we witness a paradigm shift in the way the developed world makes sense of human suffering and overwhelm, a reliance on biomedical language will, to some extent, be necessary. It gathers the perspectives of a diverse range of contributors with many different stakes in the debate – but all with one intention: to rid the lexicon of toxic unsubstantiated labels which pathologise our pain and justify suppressing our dissent (conscious or otherwise) to poverty, discrimination and abuse.

Drop the Disorder – And then what?! | Jacqui Dillon

The appetite for challenging the mainstream narrative was huge and by March 2020 we had taken our AD4E day event to 21 cities around the UK and involved many contributors in the process. I became complicit through the naivety of an institutional process that absolved my lack of human connection and moral responsibility because I wasn’t caring for this patient, I was prison guarding them. Hearing Voices Network– If you hear voices, HVN can help – we are committed to helping people who hear voices.So, I was particularly educated by the way the book encouraged the reader to explore who would be negatively impacted, and were that change to be brought about. Since then, they have delivered events in towns and cities across the UK, bringing together activists, survivors and professionals to debate psychiatric diagnosis. It approaches the topic from a range of perspectives including chapters from counsellors, clinical psychologists, survivors, activists and academics. 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.

Drop the Disorder: Challenging the Culture of Psychiatric

As a survivor of a narcissistic family, I know that the system gains power through the “divide and conquer”-method. This book takes the themes, energy and passions of the AD4E events – bringing together many of the event speakers with others who have stories to tell and messages to share in the struggle to challenge diagnosis. This moment has stayed with me for all of my working life because it provoked personal feelings of incompetence, inadequacy, and rejection. an institutional process that absolved my lack of human connection and moral responsibility because I wasn’t caring for this patient, I was prison guarding them. But equally, from a more political or sociological position I’ve often found when systemic change is mentioned, I become instinctively interested in the movements that challenge or seek to empower what might be described as “disadvantaged groups”.but also understand, with great clarity, why it is imperative that psychiatry s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) be dumped, as quickly as possible, into the waste bin. I feel enlivened by changes in my thought process and possibilities of working with a different mind-set. All are justifiably impassioned and subversive; yet reasoned, full of wisdom, common sense and rigorous analysis, informed by the latest evidence on trauma and attachment.

About | Adisorder4everyone

It comprises information, approaches to healing and resources together with links to selected clinicians, organisations, projects and support groups. There will be space for questions, discussion and the sharing of ideas making for a uniquely powerful and hopeful learning experience. I am now able to describe that version of myself to have been a tiny compliant cog within the system. This includes people with experiences of mental distress, professionals, academics, journalists, artists, politicians, authors, and many others. It would require significant systemic change to de-medicalise mental ‘illness’ but the authors suggest three steps that individuals can take to help reduce the use of biomedical language: 1) use everyday words, 2) emphasise the context of ‘symptoms’ and 3) use speech marks around diagnostic language.

The Power Threat Meaning Framework– Towards the identification of patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour, as an alternative to functional psychiatric diagnosis. The book makes it clear that people should be given an informed choice in accepting their diagnosis and how their distress is conceptualised. A. New assessment tools: based on the kinds of trauma a person has experienced and its lasting effects. Everyone who is interested in social justice should read this book, and in so doing, will take it to their hearts and utilise its insights for the common good. I was a 26-year-old support worker sat face to face with a recently sectioned, police-escorted patient on a mental health ICU ward.