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Abstract
The author of this article takes issue with the narrow, pathological view of the medical model and manualized treatments, promoting instead the need for our mental/behavioral health system to be client driven, broadened instead of constrained, and to encapsulate a relational identity as opposed to a medical one. These principles are instrumental in choice theory/reality therapy's conceptualization of total behavior (doing, thinking, feeling, and physiology) as a holistic framework to conduct integrative psychotherapy. It is asserted that the major tenets of the choice theory/reality therapy philosophy and approach can be effectively combined with other models through theoretical integration, technical eclecticism, and by encompassing common factors. It is the author's desire to inspire other choice theory/reality therapy enthusiasts to be willing to extend their theoretical knowledge and technical abilities, as well as to draw practitioners of other orientations and models closer to choice theory/reality therapy ideas.
Introduction
The DSM is a book of mental disorders that postulates what is wrong with people and nowhere in this book is there any information regarding how to help the people that are afflicted with these forms of mental illness. Diagnosis is extremely subjective, unreliable, lacking in validity, and has no bearing on psychotherapy outcomes. Quite simply, calling something by a different name or using psychological jargon does not lead us any closer to what to do about it. This current mental/behavioral health system has been adversely affected by its strict adherence to a medical model that reduces an individual's humanity through a process of selective categorization that promotes objectification and fragmentation. People and their experiences are just too complicated. Perhaps that is why diagnosis occurs at the initial session or maybe it is because this allows insurance companies to be in control of treatment decisions rather than clients and clinicians.
Psychotherapy depends on what the practitioner pays attention to and when a therapist only pays attention to the "sick" part of someone, then this clinician is limiting potential, constricting new ways of being, and permeating in total behavior terms, a "pathologizing self". This narrow view has ignored contemporary research (thousands of analyses and meta-analyses) due to economic and political factors and promoted manualized treatments that are often times sterile and do not make room for the...