This report by Justin Karter has been published by Mad in the UK. It begins:
“Mental health, a topic traditionally dominated by psychiatric and psychological theories, is undergoing a profound evolution. A recent study highlights the increased richness and diversity of mental health models that are being used to frame our understanding of the mind, madness, and emotional suffering.
Researchers Dirk Richter from Bern University of Applied Sciences and Jeremy Dixon from the University of Bath published a quasi-systematic review of theoretical models of mental health problems in the Journal of Mental Health. Their work highlights the diverse landscape of models and approaches that have sought to understand, describe, and analyze mental health issues.
The traditional dominance of psychoanalytic and social theories from the 1940s to the 1970s shifted to a biomedical paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s. But as the 21st century progresses, challenges to singular perspectives have multiplied.
‘Contemporary arguments about the nature of mental health problems have tended to focus on the tension between polar positions, i.e., biomedicine or the critical perspectives proposed by the user/survivor/critical psychiatry camps. While the bio-psycho-social model has been used to hold divergent perspectives together, this consensus seems to be fracturing,’ Richter and Dixon note.
Drawing from a wealth of resources, from academic articles to books, this new study identified 34 distinct models of mental health problems. These were categorized into five broader groups: biological, psychological, social, consumer, and cultural …”
You can read more from here.
