Challenging Psychiatry’s Reliance on the Disease Model: A New Take on Diagnosis, Pathology and Disablement (Advances in Mental Health Research)

This volume critiques and challenges the use and promotion of the disease model in psychiatry, arguing that its misconceived approach prevents the preferred disablement model from becoming the default method to understand mental health conditions, including schizophrenia.Featuring first-hand experiences as well as qualitative and quantitative findings, the book posits that mental illnesses are an expression of disablement, not disease, and that the alternative disablement approach (already being applied in the psychiatry of neurodevelopmental disorders but applicable to mental illness, too) allows for greater dignity and autonomy for the patient, collaboration between medical professionals, a replacement of categorical approaches with more appropriate dimensional ones, and a liberation from the restrictive idea of a ‘cure’.The initial chapters of the book summarize the now overwhelming evidence that the disease model is flawed, as is the simplistic materialism that psychiatry has built