Dr Lucy Johnstone
Dr Lucy Johnstone is a consultant clinical psychologist, author of Users and abusers of psychiatry and A straight-talking guide to psychiatric diagnosis, co-editor of Formulation in psychology and psychotherapy: making sense of people’s problems, and co-author of A straight talking introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework along with a number of other chapters and articles taking a critical perspective on mental health theory and practice. She is the former Director of the Bristol Clinical Psychology Doctorate in the UK and has worked in Adult Mental Health settings for many years, most recently in a service in South Wales. She is a Visiting Professor at London South Bank University, an Honorary Fellow of the BPS, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Lucy was lead author, along with Professor Mary Boyle, for the Power Threat Meaning Framework (2018), a British Psychological Society publication co-produced with service users, which outlines a conceptual alternative to psychiatric diagnosis and has attracted national and international attention. Lucy is an experienced conference speaker and lecturer, and currently works as an independent trainer. She lives in Bristol, UK.
The Power Threat Meaning Framework: a conceptual alternative to psychiatric diagnosis
The Power Threat Meaning Framework, published in 2018 by the British Psychological Society, is an ambitious attempt to outline an alternative to the diagnostic model of emotional and psychological distress. Co-produced by a team of professionals and survivors, it explores the role of power and threat in people’s lives, and the way we make meaning out of difficult experiences. The Framework can be used as a way of helping all of us, whether in contact with the mental health system or not, to create more hopeful narratives or stories about our lives and struggles, instead of seeing ourselves as blameworthy, weak, deficient or ‘mentally ill’. Dr Lucy Johnstone, who was one of the lead authors alongside Professor Mary Boyle, will outline its core principles.
Dr Sami Timimi
Sami Timimi is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist. He writes from a critical psychiatry perspective on topics relating to mental health and childhood. He has published over a hundred and fifty articles in mainstream medical, educational, and sociological journals. He has written over forty book chapters, mainly in academic books, on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems, and cross-cultural psychiatry. He has authored seven books, including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture, co-edited four books including with Carl Cohen, Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health, and co-authored two others, including with Neil Gardiner and Brian McCabe, The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence. His most recent book, published in 2025, is Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity.
Alternatives to a failed paradigm of care
The lecture will provide an explanation why, technically speaking, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental concepts do not merit the status of being medically valid diagnoses. They are facts of culture rather than facts of nature. The choice of paradigm through which we try to understand phenomena such as difficult or unwanted behaviours or experiences has profound effects on our subsequent attempts to improve someone’s functioning and well-being. A diagnostic framework encourages a focus on understanding behaviours as symptoms and successful interventions as those that reduce or eliminate these ‘symptoms’. Alternative paradigms will be provided, including those that seek to use existing resources in people’s contexts, relationships, and strengths. Also explained will be how, in therapeutic interventions, we work at the level of ‘meta-emotions’ and why this leads to many people becoming trapped rather than helped by psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy.