Yet another successful non-drug treatment for schizophrenia, YET IT’S NOT BEING USED !

TRANSCRIPT: (edited, originally generated by Youtube) …

I did the Soteria Project for which
I am well known while I was at the
National Institute of Mental Health. Soteria
was an experiment that we did for 12
years based in Palo Alto we had two
facilities one in San Jose one in San
Mateo where we took in people who would
who were young newly diagnosed as having
something called schizophrenia, whatever
that is, and there we tried there we
treated them in a special social
environment staffed by non-professionals
supervised by professionals but the
basic staffing were not non
professionals and we treated them
without neuroleptic drugs as much as
we could which was the the vast majority
had no neuroleptics for the first six
weeks and we compared them with a
randomised control group that got what
we call quote “usual treatment” on the
wards of general hospitals and in these
two communities and you know it turned
out that the vast majority of the people
who went through the
experimental programs got better within
the first six weeks without medications
some did not of course but but most did
and if you looked at change between
admission and six weeks for the two
groups the experimental and the control
group the amount of change was almost
exactly the same change in level of
psychopathology that is symptoms
were similar and but the difference
was that almost none of the Soteria
or experimental group folks had
had neuroleptics whereas all
of the control group had had
neuroleptic treatment, this even
surprised us because we thought that a
psychosocial approach would take more
time than the drugs would and so finding
comparable decreases in levels of
symptoms at six weeks is quite
surprising, for us to, but as so it
happened and and then we followed them
for a total of two years both groups and
at two years these Soteria group as a
whole was doing significantly
better than the control group
the Soteria group who were thought, the
the part of the Soteria group that were
that was thought to have the worst
long-term outcomes that was predicted to
have the worst of the long-term outcomes
actually turned out to gain the most
from that kind of a program because they
were really much better than the
comparable group among the controls which
was again one of the reasons for
starting the program was to try and deal
with the people who were sort of headed
for long-term careers as disabled
persons you know on SSRI’s or whatever and
the the, to try something experimental on
the worst cases not the best because
if you can affect the worst cases you’ve
really done yourself a favour and
we did and they were really the
strongest difference was between them
and the controls more than the overall
group the third finding was 43% of the
experimentally treated subjects never
received neuroleptics during the entire
two years and that 43% was also doing
dramatically better than
the folks who had received neuroleptic
drugs, ummm, as you can tell or maybe you can’t
tell but as you might expect these kinds
of findings are not they fly in the face
of all the conventional wisdom about the
treatment of schizophrenia and so the
project was controversial to say the
least
marginalized and was treated as an
experiment as if never done by
American psychiatry, ummm, if you look in these
big reviews of treatment schizophrenia stuff
the two or three biggest ones don’t even
have a reference to the project despite
the fact when they were written there
were on the order of thirty five papers
in the literature about it
so it’s not like you know oh gee we
missed it, that was a very
conscious choice and actually I saw some
of those reviews they sent me and I said
how can you not at least mention the
results of this Soteria project and
that didn’t change their mind about not
mentioning with the results so you won’t
find it in the standard sort of
guidelines for the treatment of
schizophrenia books that are around so
that just tells you how American
psychiatry feels about a non
psychopharmacological approach to
schizophrenia that they just don’t think
it’s worth even considering and with of
course the the aiding and abetting of
that point of view by the pharmaceutical
companies you know who have more money
than the Job and they’re happy to spread
it around so that so that everybody is
drugged and
hardly anybody gets talked to, aaah, the
American Psychiatric Association has
really just become the American
psychopharmacological Association.

[My emphasis]

According to Wikipedia, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, the United States and some other countries all have Soteria houses of one kind or another.

Where is even a single Soteria house in Great Britain ?

There isn’t one.

This country has been staffed by cowards. I’ve heard people over the years state clearly that they know that the pharma companies are very powerful, have lots of money and are “dodgy”, but in the next breath go on to state, or give away the fact, that in some way,  they know that antidepressants or neurolepics are a “proven” treatment for depression or psychosis.

What happened somewhere between the left hand knowing that the pharma companies are the problem, and on the other side, the right hand stating that “antidepressants help people with depression” ?

It’s cowardice.

It’s easier just to go along with the whole thing rather than doing the equivalent of challenging the SS Officer while he herds people into cattle trains.

This in a society that prides itself on “never forgetting” the holocaust.

This is a spectacular failure of personal responsibility.

What happened to our society in Britain ?

I’ve noticed this before. This kind of “indifferent man will save us all” kind of mentality. It’s cool to be diffident and ooze an air of “untouchability” in the face of this. Slipping out of the bargain, indifferent man can soothe himself with the idea that he has not been “soiled” by moral issues that scream at him “urgent attention required!“.

Yet he is the one that has soiled himself with having rejected his own personal responsibility in the face of those concerns that require his own urgent attention.

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