The Power Threat Meaning Framework
In June 2022, Dr. Sarah Robinson, with support from NUI's Early Career Academic Award hosted a two-day symposium on the design potential of the
Power Threat Meaning Framework
.
The PTMF was co-produced with survivors, Jacqui Dillon and Eleanor Longden and a wider project group of people who had experienced emotional distress, one third of whom had experience of using psychiatric services. It offers an alternative to dominant diagnostic understandings of distress, and seeks to deprofessionalize mental health support.
The Symposi
um brought
clinical psychology practitioners, applied psychology researchers, human computer interaction academics and people with lived experiences of distress together to explore its potential for design.
Existing e-health interventions seem to privilege bio-medical understandings of mental health and young people have expressed concern that online supports are overmedicalized. This can “obscure political and cultural formation of a range of ine
qualities and contexts that shape how young people learn about distress.” (Fullagar, Rich, Francombe-Webb and Maturo, 2017, p. 10). The Symposium explored how the PTMF might offer an alternative lens to support HCI think about mental health differently.
The findings are included in this report: