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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Producing Treatability

  • from Part I - Configuring Contexts
  • Martyn Pickersgill, The University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    Configuring Psychology
    Published online:
    20 February 2026
    Print publication:
    12 March 2026, pp 67-88
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  • Summary

    Chapter 3 explores and historicises attempts to revise the 1983 Mental Health Act of England and Wales. I focus on the traffic between: first, clinical affirmations about the need to enhance access to treatment – increasingly understood to be psychological therapy – for people diagnosed with a personality disorder; and, second, political aims to detain criminal offenders living under this diagnosis for longer periods. The rewriting of the Act, and the significance of personality disorder among these, represent a key yet underacknowledged moment in the unfolding story of access to psychological care, while also demonstrating how improved access is not an unproblematic social good. The chapter demonstrates how legal and professional discourses contoured each other such that an understanding of personality disorder as treatable through psychological intervention was produced. This improved the accessibility of therapy for some people; however, this was often as a consequence of their involuntary confinement.