Open Dialogue Treatment (90% Decline in Schizophrenia!)

babybowrain wrote:I think we are supposed to somehow also "strengthen the ego" so that our boundaries become normal, whatever means I'm not sure, and then we won't experience more psychosis.

Well, my ego is huge. Does that help?

Filler post due to the advertisement.

babybowrain: I think we are supposed to somehow also "strengthen the ego" so that our boundaries become normal, whatever means I'm not sure, and then we won't experience more psychosis.

Let me see if this will work...

[Image Source]

That's Jung's model of the psyche (clicking on the image source will lead to an article about the primary parts of the psyche). Do you see how the Ego is placed between the Persona and the Shadow? The Ego comprises both your sense of self-identity and also serves as a differentiating function that separates aspects of the personality that we feel can be accepted (thus, creating the Persona) and aspects of the personality that we feel must be hidden for some reason (thereby creating the Personal Shadow).

The Ego is your sense of self-identity and certainly, this is deeply impacted by an experience of psychosis. My preferred terms for psychosis are in fact, ego collapse or ego fragmentation. It's been my observation that not always, but nearly always, there is an event or series of events that seriously challenges an individual's sense of self-identity that precedes an episode of psychosis.

Once the boundaries of the ego have come down, content from the unconscious pours forth. Working with psychosis from a Jungian perspective includes examining this content but yes, it does seem to be important to rebuild one's ego identity. We can do that the same way we built an ego the first time -- by engaging in relationships with other people and by taking on roles and responsibilities in the world around us.

~ Namaste

See also: How to Rebuild Your Life After a Breakdown

That is interesting. A girl on another board I was on found the link to the hospital that practices open dialogue treatment, by the way. here it is : http://www.lpshp.fi/www/web/index.php?id=2 you can use google translate or altavista to translate it...the english version they have on the site isn't good though because there's not as much info as the other versions. Anyway, I'm going to go make a topic on "fitting in" etc.

They're down to 2 cases per 100,000. A 90% decline in schizophrenia! And why? Because their first-episode cases are not becoming chronic.

- Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic

I'd been curious about that quote of Robert Whitaker's. I wanted to know what the rate of schizophrenia was before because I recalled that it was considered to be quite high. I found some information on that tonight...

The province of Western Lapland (72 000 inhabitants during the study periods, 1992-1997) lies to the north of the Gulf of Bothnia and shares a border with Sweden. The southern part of the region, where most of the population lives, is industrialized. Linguistically, ethnically and in religion the population is homogenous; over 90% are Finnish-speaking Lutheran Finns and live within 60 kilometers of Keropudas hospital.

The incidence of schizophrenia has been extremely high: in the mid 1980s, for example, an annual average of 35 new schizophrenia patients per 100,000 inhabitants, average being 13/100,000 in the rest of Finland (Salokangas et al., 1991)\

Source: Open Dialogue Approach: Treatment Principles and Preliminary Results of a Two-year Follow-up on First Episode Schizophrenia [PDF File]

It is interesting...do you think it is due to the strong winters they experience and the darkness, etc? Because depression is connected with psychosis sometimes. It is strange because in their diet there is a lot of fish and omega 3, so they should be experiencing less of it.

According to this one book I found on google books the lowest rate of schizophrenia is in Denmark...I will be researching that country a bit.
From wikipedia: "he winters are not particularly cold, with mean temperatures in January and February of 0.0 °C, and the summers are cool"
"Denmark's mixed economy features above average European living standards"
"31% of Danish citizens responded that "they believe there is a God", whereas 49% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 19% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force"."
The cuisine of Denmark, like that in the other Nordic countries as well as that of Northern Germany, consists mainly of meat and fish...
those are just some things I found valuable...