Yesterday’s post about the disease model and recovery got me thinking about complaints that treatment is not medical enough. It’s worth noting that mental health treatment has a medical model and these patients believe it’s been harmful to them. What they want is something more like the holistic lifestyle approach, peer support and talk therapy that one might find in a good addiction treatment program.
This may help explain why addiction treatment guards itself from the encroaching medical model so tenaciously. (Worth noting that mental health system guards its model pretty vigorously too.)
Of course, none of this means that there aren’t lousy treatment providers or that there isn’t room for improvement in addiction treatment. Just that there is something worth protecting there and patients in the mental health system see it.
Related articles
- Transcultural Limitations of Medical Model Treatment in Ghana (madinamerica.com)
- “Disease” and recovery (addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com)
- How Talk Therapy Sold Out (madinamerica.com)
- Hope and Recovery (addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com)
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