In a Science Update, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) reports that steps are already being taken by Medicaid services to implement “coordinated specialty care” (CSC) in response to the RAISE study released last week. “The RAISE initiative has shown that coordinated specialty care for first episode psychosis is better than the standard care offered in community clinics. However, covering the cost of coordinated specialty care can be challenging. When Medicaid agrees to pay for effective treatment programs, patients in need benefit.”
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“However, covering the cost of coordinated specialty care can be challenging. ” No, the cost shouldn’t be challenging at all, if they just go steady and employ decent people. The cost should work out a lot cheaper.
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If the dropped using drugs they would have surely cut it down significantly. Even more so if they went with Open Dialogue-like approaches but I guess I can dream on.
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I believe the original Soteria was a lot cheaper than the “psychiatric” alternative.
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Indeed it was cheaper Fiachra; Mosher showed that over the long-term service users needed less support after staying at Soteria compared to people using treatment as normal.
Open Dialogue showed the same results…. they saved a lot of money for their region of Finland over the long-term, and they also reduced incidences of new chronic “schizophrenia” cases down close to zero.
There is another researcher called McGorry in Australia who has some papers about the financial impact of his approach to first episode psychoses. I think they had some good results too. I don’t have the papers right now but they can be found by searching online.
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Hi BPD,
I agree that human distress is definitely real. Specific “Schizoprenia” diagnosis though is often ‘helped’ along the way, and once a person goes on strong drugs they become homogenized.
I nearly went mad myself when I tried to come off the neuroleptics, and I couldn’t have done it without psychotherapy.
It is true that in countries like Africa most people that have ‘episodes’ recover – in the absence of intervention.
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Hi BPD,
I think I remember Loren Mosher saying this on YouTube that it was cheaper all around.
If they can eradicate “schizophrenia” with Open Dialogue in Finland through ‘psychotherapy’; then it must mean that “schizophrenia” has never existed to begin with, and that the neuroleptics were a big part of the problem.
I think that before the neuroleptics came in the 1950s the main problem was probably: neglect and social discrimination.
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HI Fiachra,
“Schizophrenia” – meaning severe psychotic states of mind characterized by chronic terror, rage, severe splitting, non-differentiation of self and others, inability to trust anyone, and so on, resulting in delusions/hallucinations/apathy – it is real. That doesn’t mean schizophrenia is a valid medical condition; but the psychotic mental states that it improperly concretizes are real experiences. Yes, neglect, discrimination and abuse significantly contribute to psychotic mental/biological states. They’re not just caused by neuroleptics, although drugs worsen and make them chronic.
What Open Dialogue did is essentially cure or significantly ameliorate schizophrenic states of mind via effective family therapy (along with sometimes effective individual therapy), in a low-or-no medication environment, something deemed impossible by American psychiatry.
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Hi BPD,
As far as I’m concerned there is no such thing as “schizophrenia” – because everybodys situation is different. When I arrived in hospital I asked for psychotherapy (and I declined medication).
Ultimately psychotherapy was what worked for me and got me back to independence. The psychotherapy that worked was of an ‘anti anxiety’ type.
But psychotherapy would have worked for me at the start (and I wouldn’t then have suffered the drug disability and the withdrawal syndrome) – this is why I say there is no such thing as “Schizophrenia”.
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I agree, there is no schizophrenia in the sense that there is no brain disease/mental illness called schizophrenia; many different factors can lead to (different kinds of) extreme mental states or psychosis. There is also no exact cutoff point at which states of mind become psychotic or nonpsychotic; states of psychic suffering exist along a continuum of severity with incredible complexity that we can’t even begin to comprehend.
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The terrifying thing about all of this is that we have no way of accounting for the number of people wrongly diagnosed and treated. Psychiatry isn’t science and it needs to stop being treated like one with the blessings of a government that bends to it’s whims.
Changes in treatment approaches are great but if they include medications, they are useless. We have nearly 50 years of failure with those “treatments” to prove that.
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Yes, we now have an epidemic on our hands of gigantic proportions, much of which psychiatry and the drug companies created. It’s disgusting and disgraceful to say the least. How many more people have to die from the “evidence based treatment” before we do something about all this?
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