All Abusive Relationships are Abusive — Even Ones in Healthcare

We urgently need to use a new mental health care framework

Lucy Johnstone, presenting on the PTMF (Power Threat Meaning Framework), at a seminar day in Gothenburg, Sweden, december 2024. Photo by the author.

Humans are a meaning making, sorting and naming/labeling species. We do this because we want to understand things, people, situation, how they are connected to each other, but also to understand why things happen. And how we ourselves fit into the picture (or not).

The modern western world does it one way, the (at least older) eastern world in another, and indigenous peoples yet in other ways; they all use different frameworks to understand the above, coming to quite different results. There is a lot of knowledge, once you start looking closer at it, that turns out to be more of a framework, than some actual truth (it has just been repeated so many times, people accept it as “reality” and “the truth”). And this is the thing with frameworks: we can choose them. Though most of us just “inherit them” and pass them on, I think we, in the escalating medicalization and pathologization of human behavior and emotions, really need to start to actively choose them. Because they make the whole difference to HOW you see people. And one thing is very clear to me, we need to humanize our so called mental health care.

“The urgent need for a shift in approach should…target social determinants and abandon…