Positive alternative treatments

I am interested in positive alternatives for psychotic treatment. I wondered if anyone has experience with those:

- Soteria. Loren Mosher developped a medfree approach to psychosis-treatment with empathic psychotherapy and connection. It sounded really good and I've visited a Soteria house in Germany. If I ever have to be admitted to a ward again I want to go there.
- Open Dialogue in Finland. 67% of first-time psychosis patients get better without meds. 80% of patients recover without relapse. They use mainly psychotherapy and involve the social network of the patients.
- Elvin Semrands work. He was a psychiatrist who actually managed to get into contact with psychotic patients and through psychotherapy made recovery possible.
- In my own country a psychiatrist (Jim van Os) made a proposal to change psychiatric care here, stating 'my country is really behind and he proposes to use intensive psychotherapy and guidance in psychotic patients.

Any other known alternatives? Anyone experience? How would you have liked to be helped, in a positive way?

I know when I was in deep panic I really needed help... just not the type of help offered by psychiatry. What I needed:

- Psychotherapy.
- More "physical" trauma therapy, like EMDR or somatic experiencing.
- Exercises and techniques for emotional regulation
- Practical help in the care for my son and Household
- Help in building a social network and dealing with my family
- Incidental meds to get my out of the first crisis maybe, if other methods fail...if I'm really honest to myself.

How about just a safe place to settle down, why make this all complicated ?

Asylum- an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.


This one size fits all and very expensive label and drugging machine they call help isn't working. If it did work and did help the number of chronic mental patients would have gone down the same way that the number of people dying from infections went down when antibiotics came out.

There is no asylum.

I think most people know when the downward spiral is starting if they lived it before, not sleeping, racing thoughts, can't stop drinking stuff like that but their really is no place to go until its gets critical and who wants to go to a hospital with its strip searches, locked doors, forced and coerced drugging and an always unknown period of detention ? Its horrible so people try to pull out of the downward spiral themselves, sometimes successfully sometimes not.

Yeah..I understand what you mean. Maybe I make it too complicated and that's enough for most. I actually think you're right.

Something your post makes me think of:

When I was psychotic and ended up in psychiatry, I would always feel so unsafe and threatened I would become more psychotic. They would use threats, force and violence and would drug me violently. They would literally physically pick me up, put me in a ward, lock me up, talk harshly to me or not at all, joke about me with eachother, leave me alone. Nobody would speak to me in a normal, gentle way, ask me what I needed or explain anything. I always thought I was in hell and they were devils.

But when I was deeply psychotic, one time, I bumped into a stranger on the streets. I asked him for help and he welcomed me into his house. He sat down calmly and empathically listened to my story. He said he had a friend who became psychotic and he himself was an ex-junky, so he had some experience in dealing with difficult situations. He offered help, asked me what I needed. He asked if I wanted to call someone. He stayed with me in a natural, peaceful way to make sure I was safe. At a certain point we sat on his balcony in the sun, he was putting plants in pots and after a while I felt a little more safe and started helping him. After only 2 hours I went from deeply psychotic (thinking my parents were of the devil, poisoned me and did not dare to eat or drink or sleep) to near-normal (happy, loving, laughing about my delusions, calling my parents to pick me up). Before turning back to normal I thought he was Jesus and God sent him to me to help me, just by the way he responded. What a difference!

I still wonder why some random "junky" on the streets could make me feel safe and happy again and psychiatry did the opposite.

Yes... maybe a safe haven with gentle, sensitive people to come back to myself would have been enough to come out of psychosis.

I DO think after that though, I needed help in understanding what got me into that situation and practical help building a good lifestyle.

-- Sun Feb 07, 2016 8:48 pm --

I do think btw the Soteria house I found in Germany is more like that.

People can come and go and decide for themselves whether they want drugs or not. There is no psychiatrist (only on an as needed basis) in the house, but there are two psychologists who you can always speak to if you want. They create a safe atmosphere. If someone is very psychotic and they fear for their safety, they don't harm or threaten them, but they stay with them, if needed even constantly, to make sure they are safe. They talk with people to see what is needed to become healthy again. Their whole attitude and atmosphere was so different!

Only in extreme (dangerous) situations they would send someone to a locked ward.

Marian wrote:How would you have liked to be helped, in a positive way?

All I needed was to settle down and get sober from the week or 2 weeks of constant drinking I did after having a nervous breakdown. I got to that point where the alcohol would not keep my anxiety down and was just making it worse. My stomach would not tolerate further consumption.

I did not need "Rapid stabilization" that part where they drug you into a shuffling zombie with Haldol and other drugs for what ever "diagnosis" they come up with after the 10 minute interview that they bill an hour for. I did not need that part where they threaten violating my body using force with a needle like a rapists trying to coerce me onto a dangerous brain disabling drug cocktail I guess for life to go with the you will be sick forever billing label from their DSM.

I should have just put down the drink walked it off sweated it out but WTF I had insurance and I was really sick stomach hurt couldn't n eat and couldn't focus on anything sleep was like impossible so I went to the hospital that's what its there for.

A month long nightmare followed, my reaction to and anger about that van ride being strip searched squat and cough threats of violate your body inject-able form and locked doors. My reaction to that kidnapping written on my medical records as "symptoms of the illness" bipolar mixed episode... Let me violate you like that and see your reaction.

Of course me refusing to go to the all mens treatment place didn't help, how is the nightmare of sharing living space with 50 troubled men going to "help" me ?? No doubt that crooked hospital got kickbacks from that. Shared living space with dozens of dysfunctional men who spend all there time talking about the drugs and the courts and watching stupid TV sports all day using stupid street slang, that's "help" ???

My medical records said "resistant to placement in treatment" more evidence I was "sick".

NO, I was not "sick" I beat psychiatric drugs after years on them, not an easy thing, and had a slip with alcohol, I am not going back on psychiatric drugs and getting put in a nasty sober storage facility and being made into a cash cow to make you people rich off my insurance. I should have just agreed went and walked out and maybe the inpatient nightmare would have been shorter.

How would I like to have been helped ? All I needed was a few days detox and a little compassion.

The problem that I have with that story is that you end it by saying that you went off with a junky and that sort of thing happens quite a lot and it sounds pretty scarey to someone that's concerned about a person that has problems.

I wasn't quite clear. He wasn't a junky (i put that in between brackets on purpose and shouldn't have used that word). He was a regular looking guy with a regular house who admitted he had used heroin in the past. He was very kind and sensitive and I was at that moment quite sensitive to whether someone was kind or not

BUT you're right.. I was in an EXTREMELY vulnerable state of mind and I most definitely needed help. I needed to be in a safe place. I needed people taking care of me. And this was very scary for the people around me. That I will never deny.

Only the kind of "help" and "care" that psychiatry gave me traumatized me even more than I already was.

I literally begged for help and placement in a safe recovery place for 8 months before I finally crashed. They refused to help me because I had "only an adjustment disorder with anxiety".

Then I finally crashed.

Which is when they came with police to violently pick me up against my will (i'm a thin young woman who was even in psychosis rigidly pacifictic), put me in a cell half-naked without any explanation, talked harshly or not at all, came with 8 people to violently drug me while in the meanwhile making mean jokes over my head (as if I weren't there) about me praying, left me alone between men that sexually intimidated me and did nothing about that, and when I was doing better they refused all and every real help (psychotherapy, EMDR, practical help, referral to a mother-child unit, etcetera). So....that did not exactly help. It is already traumatizing to someone in a normal state of mind...but even more so when you're psychotic (= extremely sensitive, anxious and wide open to everything in your surroundings).

It's not that I did not need help. It's that I did not need THAT kind of help.

That being said... I understand that as a bystander you want people to be safe...and that walking around in a psychotic/manic/psychotic depressed state is not safe.

I am very sure some people need mental help. I am pretty sure I was (and am) one of them. I just fiercely believe that the help that is offered can be done in another and much more empathic and succesful way than they do it now and with much less drugs than is used now.

My country (Netherlands) is also supposed to be a bit backwards in comparison to countries around us (Germany, Scandinavia).

Another nice alternative: healing homes, Sweden. People are stabilized on as little drugs as possible and placed in loving, stable farm families to recover.

Psychiatry: An international atrocity

They call it help but the drugs are so awful they need to make threats of forcefully violating and penetrating peoples bodys like rapists using needles "injectable form".

What sucks is many people reading this will automatically assume I brought this on myself with my behavior. NO, its like a knee jerk reaction, patient refuses to endanger their health and be disabled with drugs = make threats of scary injections. They do it all day long.

Imagine having taken psychiatric 'medication' for years and knowing how you react to it and then being in a place with locked doors and being ordered to take a handful of pills at a very high dose that you know is way too much, very dangerous and very unpleasant OR get the forced rape style injection.

It was scary, I made up my mind in that place if I was assaulted, needle raped like that I was going to find and assault them OUTSIDE the hospital when it was all over and do my jail time if caught and convicted with a smile on my face knowing I hurt them back. I was mistreated as a child when I couldn't fight back, I won't tolerate it as an adult.

The injectable form needle rape assault on my body never came and I got out of that place but that experience is what really got me started in the anti psychiatry movement.

What if i was compliant with "treatment" ? I would still be in a zombie haze and be faced with nasty withdrawal reactions if I wanted out of that zombie haze.

I am completely recovered, I will never see the inside of a hospital again even if by some chance I was to have a crisis that inpatient nightmare wouldn't happen to me again cause I know what and what not to do. Family and friends all know psychiatry is a scam, hurt me before and would back me up.

Doesn't matter, psychiatry made me sick and I saw enough of what they do to others and in fact one of the worst things in the hospital was making friends then seeing them assaulted by staff and not being able to stop it.Well F psychiatry, every day I go online and help spread the word of human rights and expose the atrocities psychiatry calls help to more people. See if I can't help stop it.

-- Sun Feb 07, 2016 11:34 pm --

Positive alternative treatments are great.

How do you get funding ?

How do you get insurance companies to pay for it ?

I have no idea.

Well, having used drugs can make it easier to relate to someone that's mentally disturbed. I once had a guy coming to my house when he was extremely paranoid and psychotic and when I told him that he was just on a bad trip it seemed to help a bit.