Emerging Concepts of Mental Illness and Models of Treatment: The Psychological Point of View

This author reviews the evidence for the "sickness" model of mental illness and finds it to be inconclusive. Psychiatry, he argues, in insisting on its prerogatives of primary patient responsibility and control of treatment facilities, bases its justification either on rare and uncertain genetic and metabolic conditions or on the common chronic organic conditions it characteristically neglects; the typical person in psychiatric treatment is suffering from neither. The alternative presented here is a social-developmental model, which would emphasize the nurturance of strength rather than the search for and excision of weakness.