Overview
This assignment invites you to consider the underlying assumptions of the dominant model of mental illness and compare these with the principles of the recovery paradigm. It encourages you to think critically how these contrasting perspectives influence the assessment and treatment of mental health problems. In contemporary mental health care, clinical or case formulation continues to be exceptionally important and the capacity to make sense of a persons problems, rather than simply labelling or naming them, is an essential capability of all mental health professionals.
It is your opportunity to consider competing discourses which shape the need for other ways of being with people and assisting them than the dominant biomedical approach to mental health. You will do so by considering how a mental illness may be diagnosed and treated from a pure biomedical point, and the implications of formulating the problem differently and considering the roles, virtues and competencies required to help the person and address the problem.
Learning outcomes
This assessment task is aligned with the following learning outcomes:
2. Review the evidence-based literature on the therapeutic relationship and argue its importance for working in partnership with consumers to meet their holistic needs.
3. Critique the constructs of Emotional Intelligence, empathy and compassion and their application to the use of self within therapeutic relationships and as a platform for evidence-based interventions
4. Construct a clinical formulation reflective of diverse consumer need and personhood stemming from holistic assessment
Assessment details
Is mental health recovery compatible with biomedical understandings of mental illness? Implications for the mental health workforce.
The task of this critical review (which may be structured as an essay) is threefold First consider a mental illness as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition (DSM-5) (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and briefly describe the orthodox biomedical view or explanation of the problem (e.g. Major Depression or Borderline Personality Disorder}. Secondly, put line a nomothetic
(i.e. general) formulation of the problem derived from psychotherapeutic literature, discuss the compatibility^ both perspectives in treating the problem, and argue which competencies are needed by workers to support recovery and healing.