Trauma, Dissociation, Attachment & Neuroscience: A new paradigm for understanding severe mental distress
Special Edition: Complex reactions to severe trauma
The paper by Dillon, Johnstone & Longden in this volume (Trauma, Dissociation, Attachment and Neuroscience) brings together evidence from the neuroscience and mental health literature with the hope that this might lead to a paradigm shift in the way that people are seen and helped. Hopefully they are right, and biopsychosocial models worthy of the name may come to dominate practice, rather than models that sometimes masquerade as biopsychosocial but which are basically ‘bio-bio-bio models’, with social and psychological factors reduced to mere events that trigger an underlying genetic illness (Read, Bentall & Fosse, 2009).
JCPCP is a peer-reviewed journal which values personal experience above professional boundaries and doctrinal jargon. It provides a forum for ideas, experience and views of people working in the psychological world and those who use psychotherapy or receive psychiatric services. The journal encourages a critical, reflexive view of psychology and counselling and is a constant challenge to orthodoxy. Our contributors reflect on their work and experiences in therapy, in relationships and in institutions. The journal embraces philosophical, radical and scientific perspectives in its analysis of psychological, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems. With a following wind, it will sometimes make you laugh out loud.
i have just read the article published in collaboration with lucy johnstone….. a new paradigm etc…. most helpful for us in understanding a recent ‘psychotic’ episode our 40 yr old son with regard to the abuse he suffered as a child. i cannot thank you enought for your insight and information. he has been labelled schizophrenic at different times and sometimes i have wondered but this helped us put it in a much clearer perspective. i am certainly beter equipped to help him now with this new understanding and to help him help hismelf.