ABSTRACT
For the most part, in the West the treatment of people experiencing mental and/or emotional distress has been dominated by practitioners who adhere to the medical model whether they are medically trained or not. That is to say that a way of thinking about and responding to physical ailments has been applied wholesale to disorders of thought and feeling. However, the applicability of a model which goes something like (symptoms) – diagnosis – treatment – cure – (lack of symptoms) has, at least from a person-centred point of view, not been proved. A second influence on understanding psychopathology has been psychoanalysis. It is from this source that some of the familiar terms associated with psychological distress arise – for example, ‘borderline’ and ‘narcissism’. Historically, both these ways of thinking about people have been opposed by person-centred practitioners although more recently there has been some move towards developing a common or inclusive language especially by person-centred practitioners who work in medical settings. This rejection by person-centred practitioners has been criticised largely on the basis that person-centred theory lacks a model of child development and a model of psychological distress. This is easy to refute (see Wilkins 2003: 99-107, 2005b: 43-50, Point 24).
as part of person-centred theory (see Rogers 1959: 222) and a linking of this to the development of distress (Rogers 1959: 224-230). This has subsequently been refined and developed by (for example) Biermann-Ratjen (1996: 13-14). There are in fact four major contemporary positions with respect to mental ill-health within the person-centred tradition. These are those based on:
