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Blaming the victim, all over again: Waddell and Aylward’s biopsychosocial (BPS) model of disability
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf
“ABSTRACT
The biopsychosocial (BPS) model of mental distress, originally conceived by the American
psychiatrist George Engel in the 1970s and commonly used in psychiatry and psychology,
has been adapted by Gordon Waddell and Mansell Aylward to form the theoretical basis for
current UK Government thinking on disability. Most importantly, the Waddell and Aylward
version of the BPS has played a key role as the Government has sought to reform
spending on out-of- work disability benefits. This paper presents a critique of Waddell
and Aylward’s model, examining its origins, its claims and the evidence it employs. We
will argue that its potential for genuine inter-disciplinary cooperation and the holistic
and humanistic benefits for disabled people as envisaged by Engel are not now, if they
ever have been, fully realized. Any potential benefit it may have offered has been
eclipsed by its role in Coalition/Conservative government social welfare policies that
have blamed the victim and justified restriction of entitlements. “
Thanks for this Keith, fascinating reading.
In preparing this paper we systematically went through the 2010 publication looking for the evidence that Waddell and Aylward used to underpin their claims and found many other examples where the citation seems to be inappropriate. For example, when Waddell and Aylward assert that the common health problems (low back pain, mental health, cardio-respiratory) are ‘often “nominal”, existing in name only, not real or actual, they are simply labels’ (2010, 7), they cite in support a review of ‘functional somatic syndromes’ by Barsky and Borus (1999). Yet the original paper discusses Gulf War Syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, sick building syndrome, repetitive stress injury and chronic whiplash (Barsky and Borus, 1999, 910), which are mostly not the ‘common health problems’ under discussion.
Is the entire Rightsnet community trying to access this document? I followed the hyperlink and got this message: Error connecting to database: User eprints already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections.
I’m bit surprised that anyone is even bothering to research W&A’s work, because I thought they had been completely discredited.
It should be available on a google search with other websites too. Haven’t had chance to read it all yet, but looks interesting so far, thank you for linking this.
Have just come across a paper by Jonathon Rutherford, which is an interesting companion piece to the paper that Keith posted. Click through and you should be able to read it for free.
Welfare reform exemplifies the transformation of the old style nation state into a new kind of ‘enabling’ market state. Instead of providing social protection, the market state offers ‘opportunities’ and ‘choice’ to ‘customers’, who in return must shoulder a greater degree of responsibility for their individual predicament. Alongside this transformation in the nature of service provision is the blurring of the boundaries between public service and private business, not least in the revolving door that operates in the higher echelons of the state. The logic of welfare reform is to reduce costs by keeping claims to a minimum. To achieve this, New Labour has adopted the practices of a private insurance company whose claims management in the US has been described as ‘illegal’.