The BPS model, contrasted with the “medical model”, is the mainstream ideology of modern psychiatry. Today, the BPS is seen as an antidote to an overly biological psychiatry; yet it might equally be a cause, failing to provide convincing conceptual or empirical grounds to resist the biologization of psychiatry. The problem exists, perhaps, in a failure of the model itself, not failure to implement it, as many presume.

The ultimate raison d’etre for the BPS model is eclecticism, the ability to “individualize treatment to the patient,” which, in practice translates into being allowed to do whatever one wants to do. This eclectic freedom borders on anarchy and produces the ultimate paradox: free to do whatever one chooses, one enacts one’s own dogmas (conscious or unconscious). Paradoxically, eclecticism produces dogmatism.

Better options exist.