Diagnosing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is not valid or useful. This is according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists, who say that, given a lack of scientific evidence to diagnose mental health problems as illnesses, there needs to be a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood.
In their statement – which has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress. In other words, they do not believe that those with mental health problems are the same as people suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. According to the DCP, their statement ‘reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems’ that are used in psychiatry today.
One of the wellness experts who helped draw up the DCP’s statement was consultant clinical psychologist Dr Lucy Johnstone, who said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes. ‘On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,’ she said.
But why are mental health experts saying this now? The DCP has timed their statement to come out just before the release of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The DSM-5 has expanded the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders, hence the new statement. grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health, for example, will now be classified as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively.
The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clinical psychologist, welcomed the DCP’s decision to speak out against psychiatric diagnosis. He stressed that we need to move away from a biomedical model of mental distress to one that examines societal and personal factors, noting, ‘We need fundamental changes in how our society is organised to give parents the best chance of meeting the needs of children and to prevent the amount of adult adversity.’
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