This article has been published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Although it concerns medical philosophy and practice in general, much of its content is relevant to mental healthcare – especially given the biomedical model upon which the current mainstream approach centrally rests.
The abstract says:
“Escalating costs, increasing multimorbidity, medically unexplained health problems, complex risk, poly-pharmacy and antibiotic resistance can be regarded as artefacts of the traditional knowledge production in Western medicine, arising from its particular worldview. Our paper presents a historically grounded critical analysis of this view.
The materialistic shift of Enlightenment philosophy, separating subjectivity from bodily matter, became normative for modern medicine and yielded astonishing results. The traditional dichotomies of mind/body and subjective/objective are, however, incompatible with modern biological theory. Medical knowledge ignores central tenets of human existence, notably the physiological impact of subjective experience, relationships, history and socio-cultural contexts.
Biomedicine will not succeed in resolving today’s poorly understood health problems by doing ‘more of the same’. We must acknowledge that health, sickness and bodily functioning are interwoven with human meaning-production, fundamentally personal and biographical.
This implies that the biomedical framework, although having engendered ‘success stories’ like the era of antibiotics, needs to be radically revised …”
You can read the article from here.
