The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Development of a document for use in intellectual disabilities services

Abstract

Easy read summary■The Power Threat Meaning Framework was written to help make sense of distress in terms of people’s experiences. It asks ‘what has happened to you?’, NOT ‘what is wrong with you?’■The Power Threat Meaning Framework could be useful for people working with people with learning disabilities and autism■We describe how we have adapted the Power Threat Meaning Framework for use in learning disability services.■More resources need to be developed with people who use these servicesThe Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) was launched by the British Psychological Society in 2018 to offer an alternative classification system to pseudo-scientific practises of psychiatric diagnosis that regard certain ways of thinking, feeling and behaving as ‘symptoms’ of unevidenced ‘mental disorders’. In this article, we summarise what appealed to us about the PTMF and we describe some of the work we have undertaken to highlight how the Framework can be applied to support understanding of the experiences of people with diagnoses of intellectual disability in ways that centre attention to the negative operations of power on peoples’ lives.