ABSTRACT
This chapter explores aspects of the validity, reliability and utility of psychiatric diagnosis through consideration of how our understanding of these factors may influence us personally, professionally and politically. We consider some of the unique challenges that might be faced by pre-qualified individuals who are navigating this debate within powerful contexts that may privilege opposing views to their own and the people they meet within services. Through reflecting upon the authors and other contributors’ experiences of receiving a diagnosis, we hope to demonstrate features of the diagnostic debate embodied within the accounts of those who identify with the personal, professional and political pulls of diagnoses. We then consider the ways in which clinical psychology can position itself as outside of the flaws of medicalised constructs of disorder, yet perpetrates similar practices that individualise and decontextualise psychological distress. We conclude this chapter with asking: Must we limit ourselves to the therapy room and in doing so, replicate the processes and conditions that unwittingly perpetuate human distress in the first instance?
