flâneur

Psychiatry’s Medical Model: How It Traumatizes, Retraumatizes & Perverts Healing - Mad In America

madinamerica.com · 2,151 words · saved by 1 readers

B efore describing how psychiatry’s medical model traumatizes and retraumatizes—both overtly and insidiously—and before distinguishing genuine healing from psychiatry’s perversion of this term, I will begin by tackling the following question: Psychiatry’s medical model is essentially a disease model. While there are controversies about its definition—which I will return to—in common practice, psychiatry’s medical model consists of (1) diagnosing a person with a mental illness if the person has been assessed to have enough qualifying behaviors termed by psychiatry as symptoms, and (2) treatment consisting of eradicating as quickly as possible these symptoms. Unlike illnesses and symptoms in the rest of medicine, mental illnesses and their symptoms are voted in as such by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists and publisher of the DSM. Ignoring the voting issue—as well as the absence of any objective diagnostic tests—psychiatry’s imagined medical

B efore describing how psychiatry’s medical model traumatizes and retraumatizes—both overtly and insidiously—and before distinguishing genuine healing from psychiatry’s perversion of this term, I will begin by tackling the following question: What Exactly is Psychiatry’s “Medical Model”? Psychiatry’s medical model is essentially a disease model. While there are controversies about its definition—which I will return to—in common practice, psychiatry’s medical model consists of (1) diagnosing a person with a mental illness if the person has been assessed to have enough qualifying behaviors terme

saved by

related reading