Person-centered diagnosis and treatment in mental health. A model for empowering clients

1 diagnosing practitioner will try to identify in a patient, Ladd and Churchill propose to analyze clinical situations with the aid of a pragmatic ‘model’, which describes in general the various behaviours exhibited by a majority of persons suffering from a given mental disorder. For example, in the case of a person having an attentiondeficit hyperactive disorder, agitation provokes a loss of focus that leads to control issues, which produces humiliation and frustration, which in turn cause difficult transitions, and so on. In sum, this model is essentially based on the observation of behaviors that individuals have in their everyday life, which is, by the way, very useful for the case manager. This pragmatic dimension characterizing the model helps the client to understand what is affecting him, and, consequently, to analyse himself his mental health disorder to his actual situation. According to the authors, the focalisation on the lived experience of clients, instead of relying on the classical medical etiology, establishes a new form of treatment allowing for the empowerment of the client.