Challenging Psychiatry’s Reliance on the Disease Model: A New Take on Diagnosis, Pathology and Disablement

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 around the concept of the brain as a kind of standalone biological computer. The later chapters consider the currently existent alternatives to the disease model and put forward the evidence for a psychiatry based on the person, as described by the philosopher Heidegger among others.

This volume will appeal to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in clinical psychiatry, mental health research, and psychotherapy. Psychologists and clinicians active in research or teaching in mental health will also benefit from this volume.

Digby Tantam studied at Oxford, Harvard, London, and the Open Universities. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society, and the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy. He is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Medicine and Population, University of Sheffield; a director of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and a and Visiting Professor in the Middlesex University, UK. He has worked as psychiatrist in the UK National Health Service for over 40 years.