A person-centred political critique of current discourses in post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic growth

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 individualizing/pathologizing ways in which these two discourses seem to be developing. Notions of lower resilience (Regel & Joseph, 2010), faulty brains (Bell, 2007), lower intelligence (Bomyea, Risbrough, & Lang, 2012), faulty femininity (Lilly, Pole, Best, Metzler, & Marmar, 2009) and personal deficits (Joseph, Murphy, & Regel, 2012) are identified. Some troubling parallels with the borderline personality disorder (BPD) discourse are drawn. Yet, while the meanings/implications of a BPD diagnosis increasingly attract stringent criticism, current PTSD and PTG research is not being sufficiently challenged from a political perspective. The article argues that person-centred approaches (PCAs) need to be more recognized as treatments for PTSD – this work is already underway (see Murphy, Archard, Regel, & Joseph, 2013, for instance) – and that, concurrently and then increasingly, practitioners of PCAs must intervene in the PTSD discourse, also challenging themselves to conceptualize what is now termed PTSD as actually just one incongruence amongst many, rather than a psychopathology encountered by some (deficient) people.