The 'Human Development' consultation

Many of the fundamental principles behind the 2002-11 National Community PD Development Programme come from a developmental view of human relations. This is very different from the psychopathological frameworks always used by psychiatrists and psychologists - which are enshrined in policy and law in many ways, with the authority they thus convey.

Here is what Nick Benefield and I wrote about it in 2008, in our editorial for a special edition of  'Mental Health Review Journal':

When human development is disrupted, the psychological, social and economic consequences can reach into every area of an individual’s personal and social world, resulting in alienated and chaotic lives and repercussions throughout their communities.  The causes of this disruption may cover the whole range of physical, environmental, psychological, social and economic factors: from an unlucky genetic inheritance to a difficult birth, child abuse, inadequate parenting, failed attachment, trauma or emotional deprivation. The causes can also be poverty: material poverty, or the poverty of expectation that leaves individuals feeling powerless to have any impact on the world in which they live.

Over-riding differences in class and educational advantage confer some with strong constitutions - or a range of poorly understood protective factors – which may be sufficient to enable them to withstand the impact of these environmental failures and emerge from their early experience to live what appear thriving and healthy lives. However, very many end up in a situation where they are excluded from mainstream society, rejected by those who might be able to help them, and destined to live lives of unremitting frustration, without the happiness and fulfilment that most of us would consider just - and expect for ourselves and our families.

These individuals, and often their families, have little psychological sense of their place amongst others or where they fit into society. School, working lives and almost any pro-social relationships are difficult or impossible to establish and sustain. They experience the world as a hostile, unhelpful, threatening or undermining environment, living in a marginalised underclass with high levels of substance misuse, self harm, criminality, and suffering severe, enduring and disabling mental distress. People in this situation will often use a considerable range of statutory services to little benefit.

A minority will receive a formal diagnosis of personality disorder and so gain access to appropriate PD intervention services. However, the majority will receive an ambiguous and often prejudicial formulation of their difficulties and will more likely to meet a range of unsatisfactory public service responses.  Dependent on the immediate presenting difficulty, this response will often be inconsistent and have little relevance to the core psychosocial problem faced by individuals who are trapped in the experience of a failing relationship with the world around them.

Current government policy on personality disorder is seeking to change this and achieve three objectives: to improve health and social outcomes,  to reduce social exclusion, and to improve public protection. Three separate policy initiatives have broadly begun to address these through the Social Exclusion Action Plan: “Emerging PD in Children and Adolescents”; “PD - No Longer a Diagnosis of Exclusion” and “Managing Dangerous Offenders with a Severe Personality Disorder”. New legislation in the form of the Mental Health Act 2007 also aims to improve access and rights to treatment for those individuals most severely affected by personality disorder.

In all three areas of this work, progress is being made. The papers in this issue of the Mental Health Review give some indication of learning and experience in the field so far. Evidence from DH funded pilots across the country is emerging to demonstrate that that answers do exist, but that they do not lie in a traditional mental health treatment model or straightforward social policy - but rather in sophisticated cross-agency work that takes in the experience and expertise from various sectors: including health, social services, offender management, housing, social security and the voluntary sector. It also involves new forms of partnership with service users themselves – where they can feel themselves as active agents in their own recovery, rather than the passive recipient of technical expertise.

This is the very beginning for a field that is more complex than a disease model or unitary interventions can address. At this stage there is a need to continue to encourage evaluated and researched service innovation, and establish a workforce equipped to meet the demand for skilled and specialist intervention. To be effective, this will require closer collaboration across public services to ensure the relevance of personality disorders is understood and informs policy, strategy and service provision across the fields of health, social care, education and criminal justice.

Since the community programme was closed in 2011, we have continued to work on the 'relational principles' behind this. The 'PD tube map' was an attempt to demonstrate the pervasive and profounf effects of what we diagnose as 'personality disorder'; and the complexity and interrelation between the systems and services we had set up to tackle it. Here is the tube map:

And a link to a higher quality pdf of it https://tinyurl.com/PDtubemap 

  

So, with particularly useful input from the Offender PD team at NHS England and NOMS (National Offender Management Service), we started to design a more 'serious' version. It is likely to be adopted by the criminal justice sector as a useful model, and there is interest that we are pursuing from the health and education sectors. The hope is that it could convey the importance of considering a non-linear and complexity-based framework for policy and commissioning in all public sector areas concerned with the various 'failures' of adaptive human development. 

At the recent Inverness meeting of BIGSPD, we started a consultation about the model - which has so fare been through eleven iterations. Following the very detailed and informative discussions we had about it in Inverness, here is the latest - version 12:

If you have any thoughts about it, please join the consultation and send your thoughts and ideas to Nick: nick.benefield@icloud.com .

But please don't use it or redesign it for your own purposes, as it is only an early draft at this stage. We are the copyright holders and we'll be after you if you do!