Philip Dawdy, author of Furious Seasons received an email detailing the opening of the long awaited Alaska based Soteria House. Based on Loren Mosher's plan for schizophrenics to live without (or with minimal by choice without coercion) medication in a supportive environment, this is ground-breaking news for the best alternative to psych med paradigm that psychiatry has based as a platform and results are low quality life outcomes for people.
Long term use of antipsychotics beat the body up. Leaving people in a dull aftermath, a continuance of symptoms and without support, relying only on medications, it becomes a world that is a sad one. I am privileged to be able to be part of this world, as a result of my daughter. It's not a world anyone would want to live in, it is a medication side effect world, it's all about medications not working, and the results of a numbed and dulled down senses.
One man tells me, "I want to play the piano, but the meds are bothering me, I can't remember how".
A woman sits across from me and her lips are quivering and hands are shaking with tremors so she cannot hold her fork.
My daughter has problems processing, and needs to see things in print. We see her hands with tremors, and I fear the day they worsen.
My hope has always been, a place she could go, be off of medication and recover the way it should be. She has a decade of proof that antipsychotics cause more harm than good, there is not one drug anyone can claim as a cure or even a symptom reliever. I've seen more than the average person inside this system, and this system, breaks spirits, it breaks souls.
If there is no longer a soul, there is no longer a person. Medicating a shell of a former self is not the goal.
Freedom of choice and peer support, let this be the evidence based paradigm, let Soteria Houses be a regular name in every single state in the United States.
IT IS TIME FOR CHANGE.
From Dawdy's Furious Seasons, the Gottstein email:
July 24, 2009
"The original Soteria House proved that outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia could be dramatically improved if a psychosocial approach was used instead with neuroleptics used as a last resort and stopped as soon as possible when they were used."
-Jim Gottstein, president of the Alaska based Psych Rights group
Soteria definition on wikipedia:
Soteria is a community service that provides a space for people experiencing mental distress or crisis. Based on a recovery model, common elements of the Soteria approach include primarily non-medical staffing; preserving resident's personal power, social networks, and communal responsibilities; finding meaning in the subjective experience of psychosis by "being with" clients; and no or minimal use of antipsychotic medication (with any medication taken from a position of choice and without coercion).Soteria houses are often seen as gentler alternatives to a psychiatric hospital system perceived as authoritarian, hostile or violent and based on routine use of psychiatric (particularly antipsychotic) drugs. Soteria houses are sometimes used as "early intervention" or "crisis resolution" services.
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The money spent on the NIMH study, RAISE could just as easily fund several Soteria houses and people would see the living proof, that mental illness responds to human kindness, love, freedom and personal self-determination, more than it responds to neuroleptics. The longer a person is on a neuroleptic, the shorter their life becomes.
My personal story about Soteria Alaska
In May of 2009 I spoke with a person directly involved with the opening of the Soteria Alaska house. I've known it was delayed from the community at large complaining that people would be unmedicated there. This is the reason many of these places do not exist or cannot open, because of the public's erroneous perception that people with a mental illness label are dangerous off of medications.
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Peer Support and Wellness Center, in Georgia
For an inspiring blog to read about this model of care, take a look at Rayne's World, authored by Jayme who opened a Peer Support and Wellness center in Georgia. Jayme has supported my daughter,and I hold a special place in my heart for her. Click here to see a post Jayme dedicated to my daughter, and watch a video of the center's first Christmas.
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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on June 14, 2007
A Systematic Review of the Soteria Paradigm for the Treatment of People Diagnosed With Schizophrenia-ABSTRACT(STUDY)
"Background: The "Soteria paradigm" attempts to support people diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders using a minimal medication approach. Interest in this approach is growing in the United Kingdom, several European countries, North America, and Australasia. Aims: To summarize the findings from all controlled trials that have assessed the efficacy of the Soteria paradigm for the treatment of people diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Methods: A systematic search strategy was used to identify controlled studies (randomized, pseudorandomized, and nonrandomized) employing the Soteria paradigm to treat adults and adolescents meeting the criteria for schizophrenia spectrum disorders according to International Classification of Diseases and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders criteria. Results: We identified 3 controlled trials involving a total of 223 participants diagnosed with first- or second-episode schizophrenia spectrum disorders. There were few major significant differences between the experimental and control groups in any of the trials across a range of outcome measures at 2-year follow-up, though there were some benefits in specific areas. Conclusions: The studies included in this review suggest that the Soteria paradigm yields equal, and in certain specific areas, better results in the treatment of people diagnosed with first- or second-episode schizophrenia spectrum disorders (achieving this with considerably lower use of medication) when compared with conventional, medication-based approaches. Further research is urgently required to evaluate this approach more rigorously because it may offer an alternative treatment for people diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
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1 comments:
I believe this is a paradigm shift that has been long over do for decades.
I have to hope, pray, and wish this project keeps running and can show the positive results that it has in the past.
Of course Psychiatry, PHRMA, and a sold out government entrenched in a failed modality will fight this project and those like it tooth and nail.
So funding will be hard to come by, and the assorted attacks plentiful; since its stands in the way of a huge money gravy train running down the aforementioned tracks of the establishment.
It's not that humane care has not been tried and successful before. It has actually has a history of far better results than the medical community.
But medicine stakes claim to absolute rights of anyone they deem to have an altered constitution whether they can treat such an infirmity or not. They even have influenced and twisted law and liberty to achieve these unjust means.
There is such huge financial and academic interest involved in keeping sick people sick and under their control.
As they say, "there is no money in healthy people".
You just have to follow the money trail, and you have a perfect snap shot of modern medicine in our times.
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