Here’s a brief video of Aaron Beck discussing the research he participated in where they helped people who had severe negative symptoms make very significant improvements. Simple methods, but really important in overcoming severe demoralization by people who had been hospitalized etc. for years. Beck and his team started with this research thinking that people could function at a higher level despite their apparent deficits in basic mental abilities – however, not surprisingly to me, they found that once the people were functioning at a higher level, those deficits in mental abilities seemed to themselves be shrinking.

http://www.beckinstituteblog.org/2011/12/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-for-schizophrenia/

A few suggestions that could help:

Ask him about his reasons for not going, and really listen to him about them before you start providing any ideas aimed at getting him to reconsider.

It’s possible he would be open to going to therapy if he thought a really understanding person was available, but just doesn’t believe this can happen. So you could ask him about what type of person he might be willing to talk to if such a person were available. Then see if you can find someone like that.

Suggest he consider just meeting with a therapist, or possibly with you and the therapist, just to talk about how therapy might go and the pros and cons of it, if he were to decide to actually engage in therapy.

Or you could tell him that you want to do family therapy, invite him along, if he doesn’t go, just go yourself and explore in more depth what might work.

All this presumes you actually have access to a therapist who knows how to work with the sorts of experiences that get called “psychotic” – which unfortunately is not true in many areas. Wishing you well with your son and your family…….

I appreciate your sense of needing help in order to help others. But it wasn’t clear from your message exactly what kind of help you were looking for.

I think it’s best when mental health workers are part of a team that is all committed to work together to find non-drug options where possible, as does the Open Dialogue approach. Even if you don’t work directly with a team that believes in such an approach, it can help to have supportive relationships with people who themselves have some interest in a more psychological approach to the problems that get labeled “psychosis” or “schizophrenia.” Being part of a study group or professional organization like ISPS-US http://www.isps-us.org/ can help, as it puts you in contact with people who are going through similar things.

If you were looking for specific information, I don’t know if I could help you or not, I would need to know what you are looking for……