Mental distress and its diverse manifestations tend to be poorly understood, with them more likely to be associated with fear and danger and exist with a context of an individualised medical discourse. This is a negative way of looking at people’s lives, blaming them for their problems as it paints them as somehow deficient or deviant and so undeserving of compassion.
The reality is that mental distress is a complex issue which affects people in different ways. A fact which should undermine any simplistic one-size-fits-all attempts to understand it and needs to always be related to broader social and environmental causative factors. By challenging narrow medicalised views of distress and incorporating social factors into conversations can lead to better understandings and attitudes towards those who have suffered. This can encourage better personal support.
There has however been less development of a social model of Madness and distress than there has been in regards to disability. However, to counter concerns that the psychiatric system is more interested in control than care, there is the need to develop a transparent system based on the views of the recipients. This would look to balance the need to restrict behaviour that becomes dangerous or a nuisance to others with how people want to live. Achieving a means of supporting people to live the lives they want requires an understanding of any barriers they may face in the community, including around perceptions of mental distress and how this is filtered by power. This encourages a view which moves beyond seeing mental distress as purely situated at the individual level but something which is impacted by the wider perceptions and behaviours of wider society.
One of the benefits of a social model of Madness/distress is that it can be a means through which to increase collaboration in order to bring into the open the experiences of those who have suffered and in particular where this has been exacerbated by experiences of discrimination or oppression. That is, rights-based initiatives often require collective action and a social model can be one means of beginning to organise. It is however important to navigate this sensitively, respecting how every person has a different experience of distress and that those who have suffered should not be considered as a group that is separate and distinct from society.