According to what has been called the medical model, people who have been diagnosed with “schizophrenia” and with “psychosis” in general, have a brain disease or chemical imbalance. Past life experience such as trauma, according to that model, has nothing to do with why people have difficult or strange experiences now. While the medical model can easily be criticized for lacking evidence, a perhaps more important criticism of it is that it lacks any model for how people recover! If people have a brain disease today, how could they go on to have highly successful lives later? And why is it that most of those who are doing best have all long ago quit their “medical” treatment, psychiatric drugs?
The best alternative to the medical model might be described as the “life” model: people’s life experience and their interpretations of their experience can lead them into some strange and often distressing mental states, in which they often get stuck, but from which they can find their way out. This “finding the way out” is what we call recovery. Like people who have been inadvertently taken on a risky adventure, those who do find their way back often bring with them a gift of some kind or other for the rest of us.
The author of this blog, Ron Unger LCSW, is a therapist who works with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, using a respectful and skill building approach called cognitive therapy for psychosis. Ron has a number of family members who have been hospitalized for “mental illness” including psychosis, and Ron himself has had experiences that might have earned him a “psychosis” type of label, had he been spotted by the mental health system at the time!
Contact information for Ron Unger:
541-513-1811
1257 High St., Suite 7, Eugene OR 97401
4ronunger at gmail.com
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I totally agree with you that it is life experiences. I do not in anyway believe I was born schizophrenic. I agree with u there. I believe I was born to be more attractive to females over males though. I agree with that part of your treatment but I do not agree with the mad pride movement and that we need to embrace the mental disorder.
Ron,
Are you a practicing Scientologist?
Andrew
Visit my Bipolar News Site…
I myself am fully cured of what was called a ‘delirious paranoid schizophrenia’ – in Italy – with the help of several years of a psychodynamic psychotherapy.
what is psychodynamic psychotherapy?
To get a definition of “psychodynamic psychotherapy” you could check out wikipedia’s definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychodynamic_psychotherapy
Ron and readers,
I hope you might take a few minutes to read something…
It’s a vision… to reform the mental health system -
http://discoverandrecover.wordpress.com/mental-health-freedom-and-recovery-act/
My best,
Duane
Hi Duane, thanks for sharing your impressive vision! I’ve been working alongside some consumer/survivors on something much more limited for our local county mental health system, which you can have a look at here.
Ron,
My best with your efforts with the local county system…
It seems we’re on the same page!
They say that all politics is local.
I find myself cheering every time there’s a local victory, and I hope you the very, very best!
Thank you for offering a different theory than the “biological model”…. my thoughts are that the psychiatric label, the drugs, telling people they will never recover… could there be any worse form of “treatment?”… we should all start calling it what it is – “mistreatment!”
I agree with what you say about those doing the best tossing out the medical model… and I love your expression, “life model.” Good stuff!
Duane
Ron my daughter was hospitalized in 2003 for depression put on a antipsychotic medication came out of the hospital full blown delusional. Not one of the pdocs disclosed any side effects of these meds. She’s never been the same..
Carol
I totally agree with you that it is life experiences. I do not in anyway believe I was born schizophrenic. I agree with u there. I believe I was born to be more attractive to females over males though. I agree with that part of your treatment but I do not agree with the mad pride movement and that we need to embrace the mental disorder.
+1
long years was looking for clear description of full recovery and clear explanation of diference between full recovery and living with medication: “better life”! Myself: i am without medication more than 10 years and for 5 years or more fear about psychaitric treatment needed has gone. That is much about to “find way out”! In my environment i know only one person who overcame his mental illness fully (he had 18 hospitalizations in 8 years! ) and he did more: he managed to overcome his diabetes with treatment of 3 insulin injections per day and other tablets in 3 years – he must follow his strict diet and physical exercise very attentively – but he is the master of his own life now! That is about my Lithuanian peers – not about survivors that i know in Europe or world. I believe there are more survivors in Lithuania then us 2 – but i haven’t found them yet. Such thing stigma is!
Thank you very very much for this website and knowledge found there!
Ron,
my daughter started experiencing psychosis in 2009, was diagnosed with bi polar in May of 2010 and often displays signs of ’scizophrenia’ .She was never suicidal and always gentle as a lamb. When she was hospitalized, restrained and forcibly drugged with anti psychotics, she became violent, more psychotic, paranoid, persistently delusional, and has never been the same since. In fact, she has been rehospitalized three times, most recently for full blown catatonia which I believe may have been the result of her withdrawal from benzodiazapine (carbamazine, sp?) although this opinion was derided by the neurologist who complained about the internet spreading all this false information, because it gave lay people like me all kinds of funny ideas, etc. I truly believe that she is now much worse than before the time when she started to receive conventional psychiatric treatment. When they started recommending ECT, for my daughter, the lioness mother in me finally started to wake up and roar. They didn’t even know my daughter and how quickly they discounted known side effects of ECT such as memory loss. By golly, those are precious memories in there! The good ones and the bad ones. In fact, her memories may be the key to her full recovery! Thank God, we heard about different treatment approaches such as cognitive behavior therapy and meditation for people with psychosis and the novel idea of asking psychotic patients about their feelings, and life trauma’s, including the trauma of involuntary hospitalization. Thank God for my daughter having the courage to defy a court order, her parents (including me her mother), her doctor’s recommendations, just about everyone involved in her care by declining the medicinal cocktail that she had been told to take everyday which was literally turning her into a drooling, shuffling zombie. I know that my daughter will have to make a long and difficult journey to recovery, especially if she continues to avoid taking prescription drugs and that there will be many pitfalls along the way and possibly relapses. But I will never again assume that my daughter’s mental illness makes her unfit to make personal decisions about her treatment or that she cannot be trusted to be the primary leader in her recovery. I now support and honor her decision whether she feels that she needs to take the prescription drugs, ask for different dosages or brands, or cease taking drugs all together. As parents of young adults with mental illnesses, of course, we want to coddle our children, protect them from all harm, risk, and unhappiness. But unfortunately, life is full of risk and mentally ill individuals whether fair or not have been dealt an extremely hard hand. If we truly want our loved ones to recover from mental illness, we have to learn to let go and let them navigate some of life’s hardships on their own terms. As their parents we should coach them and instruct them in how to communicate effectively with their medical care providers and encourage them to be empowered as consumers, not docile as lambs. Why are we so afraid of offending doctors anyway and so quick to give them god like status? HEALING IS AN ART NOT A SCIENCE. The patient and the patients family brings a lot to the table and if a doctor doesn’t respect this then get another doctor even if you have to go through the entire phone book!
Thank you for offering badly needed alternatives and genuine hope and compassion not just for mentally ill people but their families as well. Since discovering the alternative movement, for the first time, I feel hope for my daughter’s genuine recovery. We finally are beginning to see that we have the capacity to help our daughter build a support network, while approaching her recovery in a way that fully integrates and recognizes her physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Knowing when to recognize the limits of conventional psychiatric treatment is a huge leap forward for our family on this journey and we appreciate what leaders like you bring to our community.
sarah smith: I enjoyed reading your comment. Your daughter is lucky to have a mother like you.
Hardship: I think, life without hardship wouldn’t be life. Hardship is what makes us wish and work for transformation, and life is – constant – transformation. But since we aren’t afraid of anything else as much as we’re afraid of the unknown, we do whatever we can to prevent not so much hardship – as we like to think – but the awareness of it, and the transformation this awareness potentially brings about. While the majority stays unaware, making use of non-prescription/illegal drugs like alcohol, pot, junk food, nicotine… all kinds of more or less toxic substances, but also through “drugs” in a metaphorical sense, like TV, the internet, and the like, that, if used to kill time, and/or support a certain, more or less delusional, belief system (like biopsychiatry’s for instance) only, do nothing but help us avoid having to face ourselves, psychiatry’s task is to collar those for whom all these drugs don’t work anymore, whose unconscious rebels against the collective unawareness, and to drug, shock and brainwash them back into unawareness, if necessary forcibly.
“Psychosis” opened my eyes to a lot of (my) life’s hardship. All the hardship that I’d been asked to ignore, and be silent about. Before “psychosis”, my “life” had been characterized by what you might call a profound deadness. “Psychosis” had me for the first time in my life feel truly alive. I wouldn’t want to trade that feeling away for anything in the world. Not even the most intense anger, sadness, despair, and/or confusion, realizing all the hardship, feels as devastating as the deadness did.
I like what Wayne Dyer says about his traumatic childhood: “It was just perfect.” The extremely hard hand he, too, had been dealt, was what made it possible for him to become aware. And I think, what we need to do, if we really want to help people in crisis, is to, first and foremost, face our own hardships, become aware of them, and deal with them. As long as the helpers are too afraid to face themselves, as long as they resort to drugging themselves into oblivion, they won’t be able to help anyone.