The power threat meaning framework: development of a document for use in intellectual disabilities services

The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) was launched by the British Psychological Society in 2018 to offer an alternative classification system to pseudo-scientific practises of psychiatric diagnosis that regard certain ways of thinking, feeling and behaving as ‘symptoms’ of unevidenced ‘mental disorders’. In this article, we summarise what appealed to us about the PTMF and we describe some of the work we have undertaken to highlight how the Framework can be applied to support understanding of the experiences of people with diagnoses of intellectual disability in ways that centre attention to the negative operations of power on peoples’ lives.