ABSTRACT
This article seeks to contribute to current person-centred research exploring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-traumatic growth (PTG), by offering a person-centred political critique of some pathologising ways in which these two discourses seem to develop. Notions of lower resilience, faulty brains, lower intelligence and personal deficits are identified. Troubling parallels with the borderline personality disorder (BPD) discourse are drawn. While the meanings/implications of a BPD diagnosis increasingly attract stringent criticism, current PTSD and PTG research is not sufficiently challenged from a political perspective. This article argues that person-centred approaches (PCAs) need to be more recognised as treatments for PTSD and that, increasingly, person-centred practitioners must intervene in the PTSD discourse, also challenging themselves to conceptualise what is now termed PTSD as actually just one incongruence amongst many, rather than a psychopathology encountered by some (deficient) people.
