Introduction: At the SFU Ljubljana Outpatient Clinic, we currently (January 2025) treat about 650 cases, 20% of which are children and adolescents and their parents. Every week, we are contacted by parents who are not satisfied with the biomedical treatment of their children, or who are unable to receive it because of long waiting times. Their main complaints are that their children and they themselves have not been able to develop a trusting and cooperative relationship with health professionals, and that after a while they do not see the point of either the diagnoses or the medicines because they make the problems worse.
Methods: Two case studies are presented in which the adolescents and their families were treated according to the biopsychosocial model.
Results: Based on a qualitative analysis, the main differences will be highlighted between the biopsychosocial and the biomedical model, which is dominant in the field of mental health in Slovenia and whose shortcomings are reflected in:
encouraging the reification of psychological problems and viewing them as unchanging rather than dynamic, misdiagnosing and excessive diagnosing because of lowered thresholds for diagnosis, spreading of new psychiatric ‘disorders’ and iatrogenic diseases, excessive prescribing, use and side effects of psychiatric drugs, assumption that neuroscience has all the answers for psychiatry and mental health problems, discrimination and stigmatization and defining persons with psychological problems as being fundamentally different from others,
ignoring the unique needs of the individual client, imposing decisions about how to describe and classify a person’s behaviour and experience as an objective fact, rather than shared in a transparent and open manner, suboptimal expenditure and loss of public or private money.
Conclusion: Despite the nightmare of the biomedical approach to mental health in Slovenia, we have a dream that keeps us from despairing over the deteriorating mental health situation in Slovenia and worldwide. In this dream we see psychotherapy as an independent profession and an autonomous scientific discipline, which refers to the common factors, the Dodo bird verdict, the biopsychosocial/contextual model, the transdiagnostic, transtheoretical, integrative systemic, personalised approach in psychotherapy. We see how psychotherapists use process-based methods of assessment and individualised idiographic diagnosis (in the context of personalised psychotherapy), on the basis of which treatment can be effectively guided and tailored to the client's needs.
