'A Disorder For Everyone’ (AD4E) hosts events that challenge the dominant diagnostic culture in 'mental health.' We bring together people who want to see a change in how we understand and respond to emotional distress.  This includes people with experiences of mental distress, professionals, academics, journalists, artists, politicians, authors, and many others. 

Put simply AD4E suggests that there are more helpful ways to understand emotional distress than seeing it as medical illnesses or disorder. 

AD4E asks not 'What’s wrong with you?’ but 'What happened to you?’ a question that encourages the framing of distress as an understandable reaction to trauma, adversity, or just the struggles we all face as human beings in a difficult world.  

 

AD4E started in 2016 when Jo Watson invited Lucy Johnstone to do a training event in Birmingham. The appetite for challenging the mainstream narrative was huge and by March 2020 we had taken our AD4E day event to 21 cities around the UK and involved many contributors in the process.

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Since going online in 2020 we've attracted thousands more people from around the world to our annual online festival, our poetry events and our ongoing workshops. 

 

The support and feedback that we've received over the last 8 years is evidence that many people have had enough of the medical model paradigm and that it's time for change.

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As one of our allies, Robert Whitaker of Mad in America says...

'The disease model's dead. It didn't pan out!'