To me, “May is Mental Health Month” has always seemed like an excuse to hold an annual four-week-long commercial for Pharma and bio-psychiatry. Under the guise of raising “awareness” and reducing “stigma,” the PR reps out there make it safe for us average Joe’s to admit how bad we feel or how stressed out we are. Then they tell us what our problem is (“mental illness”) and conveniently offer us the solutions they are selling (pharmaceuticals and professional treatment). It’s like the soda industry taking over July and turning “thirst” into a public health concern. Yes, every summer, you suffer from an urgent, potentially deadly, recurrent craving for liquid — but thank god Coke and Pepsi have thoughtfully created products that will relieve your symptoms if taken daily as directed!!!
Suffice it to say, I’ve become a bit jaded. The flashy flyers, sagacious slogans and tantalizing toolkits notwithstanding, my pessimism about the possibility of anything paid or professional in the mental health industry to actually make the world I live in better instead of worse has grown exponentially with repeated exposure. For sure, during the first few rounds, there was excitement from the initial hype and the opportunity to actually participate and DO SOMETHING. But inevitably, for me, this was followed by let-down as retrospective awareness set in. Hey, WTF…? I just put a boatload of energy and effort into this. But very little that actually matters to me has actually changed…
The release of the Power Threat Meaning Framework by the British Psychological Society earlier this year1 might just have changed that for me. Thanks to the British Psychological Society (BPS), there might finally be a provider-proposed paradigm that is worth the effort of making the public aware. In contrast to the medical (“mental illness”) model, the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTM) is a non-pathologizing, unifying model of human bio-psycho-social functioning. It applies to all human beings — not just those of us with mental health labels. It is also not just for providers. Rather, it invites everyone to look at and offer their experience. And it supports all of us to recognize, and make sense of, the diverse, culturally relevant strategies that people around the world may employ in order to survive, meet our core needs, protect ourselves or cope with overwhelming emotions.
[For more on this story by Sarah Knutson, go to https://www.madinamerica.com/2...ower-threat-meaning/]
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