Lucy Johnstone - The Creation of a Conceptual Alternative to the DSM

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year, Lucy Johnstone and her colleagues in the UK launched the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a set of ideas that represented a sharp departure from the biomedical conceptions that animate the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This framework shifts the notion of "what is wrong with you" in the DSM to "what has happened to you," and by doing so turns away from a medical process bent on diagnosing broken brains and toward a narrative response that tells of contexts, power dynamics, and systems.

At a time when the Movement for Global Mental Health is intent on exporting the Western biomedical approaches around the world, Johnstone and her PTMF team, which has included numerous individuals who identify as service users/survivors, are seeking to promote a radically different way of understanding distress. Responses to the PTMF have ranged the gamut from criticism to gratitude.

Johnstone, a consulting clinical psychologist who has experience working in adult mental health settings for many years, believes that the current mental health system has failed, and we are now in the process of witnessing its inevitable downfall. She questions whether a mental health system is needed at all. However, as Thomas Kuhn wrote in his work on scientific revolutions, a system cannot be fully abandoned until there exists a conceptual alternative for the system to move towards. The PTMF, Johnstone believes, offers that conceptual alternative that is necessary for a revolution.

In this interview, she reflects on the reaction to the PTMF, and the possibility that it will help stir up a revolution in the field. How is the framework to be used? Does it stand a chance of becoming adopted? She also tells of how her own life experiences and the influences on her work.

Relevant Links

Dr. Johnstone took part in an earlier interview after the PTMF was launched. You may view
this interview here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/03/dr-lucy-johnstone-power-threat-meaning-framework/

More about the PTMF:
Lucy Johnstone discussing the primary features of PTMF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkNWQdVB4F0
A British Psychological Society report (with full document link to the framework included):
https://www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/introducing-power-threat-meaning-framework

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:13.8	Hello and welcome. I'm Zanobia Moral, a doctoral student and the news reporter for Madden America.
0:19.6	In this week's podcast, I'm thrilled to announce
0:21.9	Dr. Lucy Johnson as our guest. We will be discussing her involvement in the groundbreaking power
0:27.7	threat meaning framework, as well as her reflections on its response during this past year after it
0:32.9	was launched. To hear more about the power threat meaning framework, be sure and listen to the podcast she
0:38.2	completed with us last year at Mad in America, in addition to other links included below.
0:43.5	Dr. Lucy Johnson is a consultant clinical psychologist, author of users and abusers of psychiatry
0:49.8	and co-editor of formulation in psychology and psychotherapy, making sense of people's problems,
0:57.0	and a straight talking guide to psychiatric diagnosis, along with a number of other chapters and
1:03.0	articles taking a critical perspective on mental health theory and practice.
1:07.7	She is the former program director of the Bristol Clinical Psychology Doctorate and was the lead author of good practice guidelines on the use of psychological formulation.
1:16.6	She has worked in adult mental health settings for many years, most recently in a service in South Wales.
1:23.6	She was lead author along with Professor Mary Boy, for the Power Threat Meaning Framework,
1:28.8	a division of clinical psychology-funded project to outline a conceptual alternative to
1:33.6	psychiatric diagnosis, which was published in January of 2018. Lucy is also an experienced
1:39.9	conference speaker and lecturer and currently works as an independent trainer. Her particular interest
1:44.7	and expertise is in the use of psychological formulation in both its individual and team versions
1:50.1	and in promoting trauma-informed practice. Good to have you back for another interview, Lucy. Welcome.
1:56.2	Thank you. It's very nice to be here again. Yeah, it's really our pleasure to have you here
2:00.3	again, especially as we reflect on the responses to the power threat meaning framework over this past year.
2:05.8	To begin with some backgrounds, you've discussed the power threat meaning framework as a conceptual alternative.
	...

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