Craddock and Mynors-Wallis's assault on thinking

There is now an abundance of evidence, including a comprehensive review published last year in this journal, 4 that biomedical framing of mental illness tends to increase personal and social stigma and public desire for distance. [...]if diagnosis is understood in the broader sense of a thoroughgoing, descriptive and summative attempt at understanding a patient’s struggles, respectful of personal meaning and unblinded to issues of power and social context (the latter often being harder to change than biology, in which it may then of course be reflected 7 ), then we too might endorse Craddock and Mynors-Wallis’s position. In particular, as we have argued elsewhere, 3 in attending to issues of power, meaning, social context and the therapeutic alliance, alongside but not reduced to biology, we have much to offer the rest of medicine, which is also beginning to grapple with related issues. 9,10 1 Summerfield D. The invention of post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric category.