This learning we call therapy: medical model realism and its alternatives

A School of Education seminar hosted by the Centre for Research in Human Flourishing  

Presented by Professor David Murphy, School of Education, University of Nottingham    

In the last century and half, the medical model was advanced as the epistemic source for understanding human psychological distress. Critics, though, might argue that the medical model is contemporaneously better fit to the category of doxa. Put another way, there has been a substantial reduction in the explanatory power and validity of the medical model. However, challenges to the medical model have not completely succeeded and it remains the dominant system for thinking about human psychological distress. Alternatives to replacing it with a new episteme have fallen short. These challengers have come from various sources, often positioning themselves, for example, as being ‘anti-psychiatry’, ‘critical psychiatry’ or some might argue the entire field of ‘psychological therapies’. Why have attempts at finding alternatives failed in establishing a clear, new, emerging episteme?  

In this talk, I shall offer some preliminary suggestions why this failure has occurred, arguing that the psychological therapies are hampered by what I have termed a medical model realism. Then, I will offer some tentative suggestions for an alternative episteme of human psychological distress. One, if accepted, requires repositioning human psychological distress and all our attempts to facilitate its relief, outside of a healthcare discourse and within a pedagogical discourse.