Power, Threat, Meaning Framework: A Philosophical Critique

Abstract:In this paper, I offer a philosophical critique of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). This framework was launched in the UK in January 2018 as a non-pathologizing way of understanding mental distress. It argues that those experiences diagnosed as mental illnesses are better understood as meaning-based threat responses to the negative operation of power. My critique consists of three parts. First, the PTMF argues that it is opposed to a concept of mental distress as illness. However, the PTMF unfolds an account of mental distress that is very similar to other accounts of mental illness in the philosophical literature. The PTMF does not reflect upon, recognize or give an account of its own grounds for judging mental distress as distress. If it were to do so, I argue that it would produce an account of mental distress that is very similar to many other accounts of psychiatric illness or disorder. Second, I criticize the account given of meaning in the PTMF. I argue that this account is ultimately a reductive, behavioral account of adaptation that downplays important existential aspects of experience. Furthermore, the account of interpretive sense-making in the PTMF is conceptually confused. Finally, I outline a critique of the way that the concept of power, the great strength of the PTMF approach, is reduced to a concept of threat. I argue that this tends toward a linear view of causality that is reductive in its search for the meaning of mental distress.