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pachyderm: I am aware that I want/need/think I need that psychiatry change. It's for their own good, after all... And if no one points out their errors, will they ever change?
I could hardly claim to not be critical of psychiatry, in spite of which, I have a blog filled to the rim with quotes from psychiatrists and psychologists I sincerely admire. Overall, I think psychiatry has failed "schizophrenics" in this culture but that doesn't mean all psychiatrists/psychologists have failed -- a rare few have genuine insight into what is most helpful, and it's those rare few who are producing recovery. It's not enough to be "anti-psychiatry" but it's certainly beneficial to be "highly discriminating" which is another way of saying, "be choosy" about who you work with. If "schizophrenia" is what you're dealing with, there's little point in seeing a marriage counselor or heart specialist. There also may not be any point in seeing a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists treat with drugs and the individuals who are producing the best results in terms of recovery (80-85%) relied most heavily on talk therapy.
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Mosher points out that the kind of therapy dispensed at Soteria House differed profoundly from the work that went on at the famous Chestnut Lodge psychiatric hospital in the '50s and '60s. There psychiatrists had tried to cure patients with traditional Freudian-style psychotherapy. "I'm fond of saying psychosis does not fit the 50-minute hour -- because it goes on 24 hours," Mosher says. "So you ought to conform your treatment to fit the problem." Rather than scheduling specific sessions with their charges, the Soteria staff members made a commitment to be available every moment of the schizophrenic residents' waking hours. Mosher says the overall feeling had much in common with the "moral treatment" asylums that appeared in America in the first half of the 1800s.
Source: Still Crazy After All These Years
See also:
[*] Dialogue is the Change: Dr. Jaakko Seikkula[*] Diabasis: Dr. John Weir Perry[*] Schizophrenia & Psychotherapy: Dr. Bertam Karon[*] Learning From Northern Europe: Dr. Daniel Fisher[*] The Experience of Schizophrenia: Dr. R.D. Laing
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However, I am coming to a point of trying to work more on my own, believing that trying to change others is not very productive.
I've come to accept that I can't change others. It's possible that something I say or do might cause them to change but this will only be true if somewhere, they agree with me already. Therefore, my actions haven't produced change, they have, at best, brought to the surface a form of agreement.
Nonetheless, I keep putting the information out there because those who go searching for programs that were offered by the likes of Loren Mosher, John Weir Perry and Jaakko Seikkula are going to find that they're not available. It's possible that in the years to come, psychiatry (if it can lose its addiction to big pharma) actually will change its tune, but that's not going to help the people who are suffering
today. Those people will need to create for themselves what psychiatry is incapable of doing for them.