Outline for a future psychiatry: the transcendent meaning model (TMM)

Abstract

The now-dominant medical model of psychiatry has recently been challenged by the post-psychiatry movement. However, the former discounts the agential or subjective aspect of the human being; the latter misses the axiological aspect. A new model is proposed-the Transcendent Meaning Model (TMM)-that nests the individual person within the social (the interperson), and the social within the transcendent or ideological. The study concludes that TMM, with its integration of the personal, the social and the religious-ideological with the material, is a viable blueprint for a future psychiatry that can address some of the current model's vulnerabilities.

Keywords:

• Positive Psychology 2.0
• fourth industrial revolution
• theory of psychiatry
• social psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a Bourdieuian notion of ‘social object relations,’ which differs from the TMM version of the term presented here, cf. Ruiz (2017).