The intended purposes of this book as stated by the author are to explore the philosophy, theory and practice of the person-centred approach in the context of both contemporary psychiatry and mental health services provided by the UK's National Health Service. Achieving these stated purposes are an ambitious undertaking; however when one considers the intended readership as outlined by the author, the nature of the task set seems to be somewhat monumental in nature. The introduction to this book is intensely personal in parts and would I feel have been better placed later in the text so as to allow the reader to address the issues being presented without being unduly influenced by the authors personal experiences.
The book is divided into two sections: section 1 addresses the theoretical and philosophical challenges of the person-centred approach and section 2 addresses the practical application of the person-centred approach. The first section begins by drawing attention to the variety of ways in which terms such as patient-centred, person-centred care and person-centred approach permeate contemporary health policy documents and the health care literature. Moreover, it is highlighted that such terms, emanating as they do from different ideological origins, are frequently used interchangeably and in the author's opinion, imprecisely. Considerable attention is paid in this part of the book to what is wrong with the NHS mental health services and at times I felt the constant presentation of negative attributes detracted from the author's valid arguments.
This section continues to introduce the key tenets of Rogers's theory of personality including the 'organism and the self', the 'actualising tendency' and his concept of the fully functioning person. While appreciating that the author frequently had mental health professionals in mind when writing this book, her desire to appeal to a wider audience could potentially be undermined in that a degree of pre-existing knowledge relating to psychology and personality theories is presumed. Indeed, without this I would have found some of the concepts introduced throughout this section difficult to fully comprehend.
Other areas addressed in section 1 include power and expertise, theoretical perspectives and concepts relating to causes of mental illness, assessment diagnosis and the medical model, as well as the person-centred approach to treatment. In addressing the issue of power, the author presents an unsurprising discussion of power and power relations within the psychiatric system and her intention to 'rescue' the concept of power from its mostly negative connotations is somewhat lost in the chapter.