The 'Power Threat Meaning Framework'Yet Another Master Narrative? Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, PhD (bio) Proposing narratives that reflect our values and address what we believe to be, and what in fact in this case are, valid concerns is no doubt an attractive venture. But good intentions are not enough, and often it is careful analysis that shows why this is the case. Alastair Morgan's (2023) essay Power, Threat, Meaning Framework: A Philosophical Critique is a bright example of philosophy-in-action; it demonstrates, to use a popular expression, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In this commentary I argue that while the concerns of the authors of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) are valid, their proposed solutions lead us to yet another master narrative. The PTMF presents itself as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018). The conceptual, scientific, and anthropological limitations of psychiatric diagnoses have been identified and debated for several decades. Conceptually, there remain difficulties in drawing clear boundaries that separate mental disorder from its absence. Scientifically, the search for discrete biomarkers for particular conditions has proved elusive, with continuing reliance on phenomeno logical classifications, and ongoing complaints that psychiatric categories lack validity. Anthropologically, while mental distress and related forms of experience occur in all communities around the world, existing classifications reflect the cultural psychologies and conceptions of the person of their societies of origin in North Europe and North America. Authors of the PTMF document discuss and cite aspects of these critiques in their document. They intend for the PTMF to address some of these shortcomings and in this way to provide a better way of understanding and managing mental health difficulties. In this commentary, I shall focus on one aspect of the PTMF, which is the narrative aspect, i.e., the PTMF as a story we can tell about mental health difficulties. Authors of the document foreground this narrative aspect and dedicate ample space to it. The authors, and rightly so, take issue with the implications of diagnostic narratives on the meaning and intelligibility of mental health phenomena: psychiatric diagnoses change what people feel and do into something they have (e.g., 'schizophrenia') or are (e.g., a damaged or defective kind of personality.) Diagnosis can also remove meaning [End Page 69] and intelligibility from thoughts, feelings and actions. (2018, p. 29) Further on in the document the authors point out, again correctly, that diagnosis is itself a kind of meaning, although an exclusionary one: Diagnosis is not a description on which a range of narratives can easily be built. Rather, diagnosis itself incorporates a powerful narrative about the nature and causes of troubling experiences and behavior, about the kinds of patterns to be found amongst them. (2018, p. 90) So, the concern is not that diagnosis removes meaning entirely but that it offers one specific and rather narrow perspective grounded in ideas such as incapacity, illness, and psychological and biological dysfunction. This perspective can result in loss of agency and diminished possibilities for self-understanding and so can be both disempowering and reductive (ibid.). Accordingly, diagnosis cannot always do justice either to the phenomenon itself or to how people experience it and the sort of meanings they are inclined to draw from it. It cannot do justice, that is, to people's own constructions of what they are going through, a point most acutely felt with the conditions known as 'schizophrenia' and 'bipolar disorder.' Now, of course, in some cases people find agency and self-understanding through diagnosis, something we see today through the ascription of ADHD and Autism-spectrum diagnoses, among others. But in many cases diagnosis can be a hindrance to agency and self-understanding, a point repeatedly made by activists and service-users (see Rashed, 2019, Chapter 1, for a review). The PTMF critique of diagnostic narratives, in so far as meaning-making is concerned, can therefore be parsed out along two lines: 1) A critique of the content of diagnostic narratives. 2) A critique of the extent to which diagnostic narratives are open to modifications of their content to offer a reasonably flexible blueprint for people's experiences with the minimum amount of...