Learning Journal 46

This week we very much aimed for the 6.2.4 criteria. We reflected upon the approaches to mental health that there are, from the person centred supporting role alongside the client, to the other extreme of diagnosing mental health conditions that the medical profession have been attempting to do along their developmental path, to the client. I see them very much from that extreme opposing sense.

Also the medical model has never been humble in its approach to me. It has never looked at itself and cast any doubt through the ages, it has lorded over us, commanded respect by inference and hidden itself behind a language hardly any of us can share. It has been exclusive. That is something I very much don’t want to take into the counselling profession. The counselling profession I suppose is a lot younger as it is a product of its age, of industrialisation and a growing middle class. The ever growing middle classes and ever more comfortable working class population now has time to think about how it feels I imagine, not just eat, work, sleep and die. With the advent of leisure we may have seen the growth in introspection, which surely was a previously luxurious and frivolous pastime to our ancestors? That being said the counselling and psychotherapy professions are generally humble as they move away from their own medical origins and place the client as more of an equal, or in humanistic terms, the expert.

The medical model brings together a diagnosis with a biological cause or at very least a biological element. So in terms of a very common mental health problem, say depression, the medical model might suggest that there was an imbalance in the chemistry in the brain perhaps such as a lack of a certain neurotransmitter for example, or a deficiency in the production of another. With a chemical problem there follows a chemical solution and so there are a whole host of medical interventions that may well ‘fix’ the biology. However while a solution may be necessary in terms of relieving extreme symptoms or taking away an immediate danger of suicidal or self-harm, the act of artificially altering the chemistry of the brain is not in itself a solution, if the cause is not biological. I have anecdotally found general practioners all too quick to reach for the problem to fix the person in front of them, partly through a desire to help no doubt.

Diagnosies can in my experience be very affirming. I feel that the medical model can give way to a starting point by matching common symptoms and