Creativity and Social Support: A Combination Therapy

Abstract

In a challenge to what they term a ‘technological paradigm’ that has dominated mainstream psychiatry in recent decades, Bracken et al. (2012) have outlined its origins and its shortfalls as follows. From the nineteenth century asylum-based ‘medicine of the mind’, a biomedical ideology has predominated. Alongside this focus by psychiatry on neuro-chemistry and psychopharmacology came the equally technological cognitive therapies. Like psychiatry, cognitive approaches adopted technological models, this time based on information processing and other mechanistic techniques that put the impact of values, relationships, complex systems, cultural codes and meanings into a secondary position. A similar type of categorical mapping of mental health problems is applied in both bio-medical and cognitive-behavioural worldviews according to Bracken et al. (2012) which is, they argue, a mistaken application. There is no doubt that psychiatrists care about patients and that cognitive therapies in particular have to some extent blended into a more person-centred counselling world that pays attention to the therapeutic alliance and a person-centred approach. But the technological framework remains intact most notably in the form of the ‘psychiatry bible’ in its updated version, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 (APA 2013).