Moving beyond psychiatric diagnosis and the medical framework towards social recovery: an interview with Jim van Os

Abstract

There is a growing realization in the field of psychiatry that we are unable to free ourselves of the constraints imposed by our concepts, as well as to move beyond them. Thus, the field demands not only more robust empirical evidence but also a more sophisticated conceptual framework, which would allow for critical and innovative thinking to conceive and to build better models of mental health care. In this spirit, we present a very thought-provoking interview with Dutch psychiatrist Jim van Os, encompassing biographical issues from his academic background as well as his ideas on recovery and the Dutch experience of the recovery colleges as a “shadow mental health system” in the Netherlands. Adopting a critical stance on psychiatric diagnosis and the validity of group-level comparisons in evidence-based psychiatry, and in line with the ideals of the recovery movement, van Os points out that the process of healing should surpass symptom reduction. For him, it should take into account the long-term process of developing resilience, learning to deal with suffering through interactions with other people, building up new perspectives, goals, and existential purposes. In other words, he emphasizes the idea of social recovery and favors the thought that mental health professionals should try to “help people to relate better to their mental variation and offer them ways of doing that differently.”