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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Responsibility and Blame in the Clinic

By Hanna Pickard
Flickers of Freedom
Originally posted January 17, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

But we can really help these patients if we adopt a stance that I call “Responsibility without Blame”. Here’s what this means. The problem behaviour is voluntary. Patients with PD are not mentally ill and they know as well as most of us do what they are doing when they act. They have choice and control over their behaviour at least in the minimal sense that they can refrain – which they will often do if sufficiently motivated.  That does not mean that refraining is easy.  Here a little more background is important: PD is associated with extreme early psycho-socio-economic adversity. Most patients come from dysfunctional families or they may have been in institutional care. Rates of childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse or neglect are very high. Socio-economic status is low. Additional associated factors include war, migration, and poverty. Problem behaviour is often a learned, habitual way of coping with the distress caused by such adversity, and patients may have hitherto lacked decent opportunities to learn alternative, better ways of coping. So, until the underlying distress is addressed and new ways of coping are learned, restraint is hard.

The entire blog post is here.