This report addresses service user and survivor views about ways of understanding madness and distress, but in particular about the potential of a social model.
Criticisms of a purely biomedical model for understanding mental illness (in which mental illness is assumed to exist as a disease with biomedical origins) have been around for some years now, dating at least as far back as the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 70s. Decades of research have failed to confirm biomedical explanations for mental illness (Bishop, 2014; Middleton, 2013; Thomas, 2013). However, the biomedical model appears to remain strong and well, dictating both the nature of our services and the research paradigm that dominates our evidence-based treatments (Faulkner, 2015).
Often absent from this debate are the voices of service users and survivors and this is where the strength of this report lies. In engaging with service users and survivors over a two-stage period, the authors have demonstrated that people living with mental distress are well able to enter the debate and engage with these complex issues.
Personally I think we need a bio-social approach.