ÅsgĂ„rd psychiatric hospital in TromsĂž, Norway is a rather tired-looking facility, its squat buildings mindful of institutional architecture from the Cold War era, and in terms of its geographic location, it could hardly be located further from the centers of western psychiatry. TromsĂž lies 215 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with tourists coming during the winter months to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. Yet it is in this remote outpost, on a hospital floor that had been closed but was recently refurbished, that one can find a startling sign on the door to the ward: medikamentfritt behandlingstilbud.

The translation to English: medication free treatment. And this is an initiative that the Norwegian Ministry of Health ordered its four regional health authorities to create.

Magnus Hald, at the entry to the medicine-free ward in TromsĂž

The title—medication free treatment—does not precisely capture the nature of the care provided here. This is a ward for psychiatric patients who do not want to take psychiatric medications, or who want help tapering from such drugs. The governing principle on this ward, which has six beds, is that patients should have the right to choose their treatment, and that care should be organized around that choice.

“It is a new way of thinking,” said Merete Astrup, director of the medication-free unit. “Before, when people wanted help, it was always on the basis of what the hospitals wanted, and not on what the patients wanted. We were used to saying to patients, ‘this is what is best for you.’ But we are now saying to them, ‘what do you really want?’ And they can say, ‘I am free; I can decide.’”

This ward, while located far from the centers of power in western psychiatry, can be seen as a “beachhead” for dramatic change, said Magnus Hald, chief of psychiatric services at the University Hospital of North Norway. “We have to consider the patient’s perspective as equally valuable as the doctor’s perspective. If patients say this is what they want, that is good enough for me. It’s about helping people move forward in their lives in the best possible way, and we should help people move forward with the use of drugs if that is what they want, and if they want to sing a drug-free song, we should be backing them. We should be making that happen.”

As might be expected, this initiative, which has been long in the making, is roiling Norwegian psychiatry. It is a story of many dimensions: successful political organizing by user groups; pushback from academic psychiatrists; debates about the merits of psychiatric drugs; and an effort—most notably in Tromsþ, but in other regions of the country too—to rethink psychiatric care.

“The debate is a lot like what you see when there is a paradigm shift threatening to happen,” Hald said.

The User Voice Is Heard

The Ministry of Health’s mandate for medicine-free treatment resulted from years of lobbying by five user organizations, which came together in 2011 to form Fellesaksjonen for Medisinfrie Behandlingsforlop (Joint Action for Drug-Free Treatment in psychiatry). What is particularly remarkable about this mandate is that it required the health ministry to override the objections of a medical profession and listen instead to a group of people that usually have little political standing in society.

When I asked the leaders of the user groups about this, they spoke—with some pride—of a political culture in Norway that strives to be inclusive of all groups. This practice has been evolving for decades, and several referred to a change in abortion law as a bellwether moment in this transformation of their society.

Prior to 1978, a woman seeking an abortion had to apply to a commission of two physicians for permission to end her pregnancy, with the application made by her physician. If married, the woman’s husband had to consent. However, with a strong feminist movement pushing for change, that year Norway passed an Abortion on Demand law, which gave the woman the right to make this choice.

That same year, Norway passed a Gender Equality Act, which stated that women and men should be given equal opportunities in education, employment, and cultural and professional advancement. Today, gender equality laws require that each gender represent at least 40% of the members of official committees, the boards of public companies, and local governmental bodies. In a similar vein, labor unions remained strong in Norway, and today businesses are expected to hold yearly meetings with their employees to discuss their operations and how they might be improved.

All of this tells of a country that was intent on creating a society where the voices of all its citizens could be heard, and this ethic spilled over into health care. It became customary for hospitals and other health care providers to set up “user councils,” with the understanding that “users should have a voice and should be listened to,” said HĂ„kon Rian Ueland, leader of We Shall Overcome, a psychiatric survivor group. “And this isn’t only in psychiatric care. Users and the relatives of users in all areas of medicine should be listened to.”

While this provided fertile soil for the rise of user groups in psychiatry that would have access to politicians and the health ministry, their potential political power was mitigated by the fact that the various groups had different philosophies about psychiatry and the merits of its treatments. On the one hand, there was We Shall Overcome. Founded in 1968, it is best described as a psychiatric survivor group, intent on fighting—as its name indicates—for the civil rights of “ex-patients.” On the other hand, there are more moderate groups like Mental Helse, which, with its 7,500 members, is the largest mental health organization in Norway. For the longest time, these differences made it difficult for the user groups to successfully lobby the government for change.

“We don’t agree on anything,” said Anne Grethe Terjesen, leader of LPP, a national association for families and “carers” in mental health. “So the government says, ‘you want this, but there are others that want that.’ This allowed them to ignore us.”

However, during the past 15 years, all of the user groups watched with dismay as one particular aspect of modern psychiatry—an increase in forced treatment—took hold in Norway. At least one study found that Norway has the highest rate of forced treatment of any country in Europe, and such compulsory orders regularly follow discharged patients into the community, which user groups see as both shameful and horribly oppressive. Today, outpatient teams come to a person’s home to ensure compliance with an order to take medication, which can be for “life,” the leaders of the user groups said.

“That’s the problem,” Terjesen said. “Once they have documented that you have to use the medication, it is very, very difficult to come off that order. If you say you don’t want it, you can complain to a commission, but most lose there.”

Added Per Overrein, a leader with a user group called Aurora: “I have never heard of a patient winning” at a hearing.

In 2009, Grete Johnsen, a long-time mental health activist, joined with other activists to write a manifesto for change titled Cooperation for Freedom, Safety and Hope. “We wanted to create an alternative to psychiatry,” she said. “We wanted to create something of our own. Our goal was to create a place, or a center, with freedom and without forced treatment, and without medication being the center of care.”

In fairly short order, five diverse organizations joined together to lobby for such change. Much like Mental Helse, LPP is a more moderate organization. Aurora, We Shall Overcome, and White Eagle all come more from the psychiatric-survivor end of the spectrum.

“The groups are very different, and so it took quite a bit of discussion about how to say things, and how to come across to different levels of government, and how to pick the best person to come across with a united, unified message,” Ueland said.

Although the groups were focused on ending forced drug treatment, they didn’t think that they could achieve that goal, and so they focused on getting the government to support “medication free” treatment for those who didn’t want to take the drugs. This was not such a radical request, as it fit with the principle that hospitals and other health care providers should listen to “user” groups and develop care responsive to their wishes. Starting in 2011, the health minister began publishing a “letter” each year telling the country’s four regional health authorities to set up at least a few beds that could provide such care. Yet, year after year, the minister’s letters were regularly ignored by the four authorities, Terjesen said.

“They wouldn’t listen. The hospitals weren’t doing anything. Nothing happened. We were very frustrated. No one in Norway cared.”

And then, she said, “something happened.”

The “something” was a cascade of negative news about the state of psychiatry in Norway. There were stories about “illegal things happening in psychiatric wards,” and how “belts were being used so much more often,” Ueland said. A study reported that forced treatment was 20 times more common in Norway than in Germany. And outcomes for psychiatric patients weren’t particularly good, either.

The leaders of the Fellesaksjonen for Medisinfrie Behandlingsforlop

“We were lucky,” Terjesen said. “Treatment was not good. If treatment had been very good, it would have been more difficult. But everything coming from the government now was that we do not have good results, people are dying early, we are using much money, the users are not satisfied, the whole package is not good. The minister says we cannot have this.”

On November 25, 2015, the Norwegian Health Minister, Bent Hþie, issued a directive, which effectively transformed the “recommendation” contained in previous letters into an “order.” The country’s four regional health authorities, in “dialogue with user organizations,” needed to create a plan for “treatment measures without drugs.”

“Many patients in mental health care do not want treatment with medications,” he wrote. “We must listen to them and take this seriously. No one will be forced to take medication as long as there are other ways to provide the necessary care and treatment. I think the creation of drug-free treatment is too slow, and have therefore asked all the regional health authorities to have established this offer (of drug-free treatment) by 1 June 2016.” In addition, he said, the authorities should offer “a planned reduction of drug therapy for those patients who want it.”

The health ministry had put its stake in the ground. This initiative fit in with a larger goal that HĂžie had set in one of his earlier letters. “We will design a health care system that puts the patient at the center . . . it involves giving them rights . . . Patients’ rights are to be strengthened.”

The Resistance from Psychiatry

The leaders of Fellesaksjonen speak today about how this was a “brave” thing for Hþie to do, and how it showed that he was “a listening person.” But they also knew that this mandate, which raised questions about the merits of antipsychotics and other classes of psychiatric drugs, would stir opposition from many corners of psychiatry, which proved to be the case. No regional authority met the June 1, 2016 deadline, and in many corners of Norwegian psychiatry, psychiatrists spoke out in fierce opposition to it. Tor Larsen, a professor of psychiatry at Stavanger University, publicly derided it as a “giant mistake.”

“Drug free treatment is not only a bad idea, but simply may end up being an introduction of systematic malpractice in Norwegian psychiatry. At worse, lives lost,” he wrote. “The most seriously ill often lack understanding of their disease . . . (they) do not see themselves as sick. The freedom of choice the health minister now wants to impose will thus lead to a lot of very seriously ill people being deprived of the right to the best possible treatment.”

This was the core argument repeatedly made by psychiatrists against the initiative: the drugs were effective; there were no non-drug treatments that had been shown to be effective for psychosis; and patients who didn’t want the medications didn’t understand that they were ill and needed the medications.

This initiative will “create an attitude that largely supports a pronounced skepticism about drug therapy,” wrote Jan Ivar RĂžssberg, a professor of psychiatry at Oslo University, in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper. “My fear is that the measure will mean that people with psychotic disorders come later to optimal treatment that you know works . . . I cannot be responsible for the teaching of psychiatry at the University of Oslo that would support this development” of medication-free treatment.

The debate has continued since then, and even after Tromsþ opened its medication-free ward in early January, there remained considerable question of whether other regional authorities would comply with the spirit of the health ministry’s directive. The Norwegian Psychiatric Association, for its part, officially decided to “keep an open mind,” and address the topic at its annual meeting. “Do antipsychotics work?” wrote Anne Kristine Bergem, president of the association. “Or do they not have the effect we have been led to believe?”

The Donald Trump of Antipsychiatry

The association had identified the scientific question at the heart of this initiative. Forced treatment meant forced use of antipsychotics, and with the controversy ongoing, a non-profit organization, Stiftelsen Humania, joined with Fellesaksjonen to organize a public debate on this initiative, which was held on February 8 in Oslo. They titled it: “What is the knowledge base for treatment with or without the use of psychotropic drugs?”

“I would like to see this argued,” Ueland said, in the afternoon before the debate. “They say they want proof that alternatives work. I say, ‘why don’t you provide proof that your treatment works? I have read a lot of articles and a lot of books, and I still have not seen proof that your drugs work. I have seen proof that they make people feel ill, that they take away their emotions, that they treat symptoms, but give me proof that they work on psychosis, that they work on what they call schizophrenia.’ I want to see that before they sit there and tell us that we can’t have drug-free treatment.”

Einar Plyhn

The leader of Stiftelsen Humania is Einar Plyhn, a businessman whose company, Abstrakt Forlag, publishes academic texts. He came to this battle after suffering the loss of both his wife and son to suicide, neither of whom had found relief from psychiatry. “My experiences as bereaved by suicide two times brought me into a psychiatric ward myself, where the only treatment I got was medication and ECT,” he said. “After finally getting off all the meds, I started to publish books critical of psychiatry, and arranging conferences.”

One of the books he published was a Norwegian translation of Anatomy of an Epidemic. In that book, I had written about the long-term effects of antipsychotics (concluding that the research showed that, on the whole, they worsen long-term outcomes), and so Plyhn had asked that I speak at this debate. The other speakers were Ueland, RÞssberg, and Jaakko Seikkula, who presented on Open Dialogue Therapy in northern Finland (where psychotic patients are not regularly placed on antipsychotics). Magnus Hald was part of the panel.

The debate took place at the Litteraturhuset in Oslo, and a half hour before the auditorium doors opened, there was a large crowd of people waiting to get in, evidence of how the medication-free initiative had stirred up considerable public interest. The auditorium quickly filled, with the overflow crowded into an adjacent room, where they could watch the debate on video, which was being streamed on the Internet. The audience included mental health professionals, members of user organizations, and one or more representatives from the pharmaceutical industry.

Ueland spoke first, reading a powerful blog from a 25-year-old woman in a locked ward who described the trauma of being forcefully treated. Then it was Rþssberg’s turn, and, it’s fair to say, he came ready to do battle.

Jan Ivar RĂžssberg

RĂžssberg said that three of the user groups were “antipsychiatry” organizations; argued that there were no non-drug therapies that had been proven to be effective as short-term treatments for psychosis; and criticized Seikkula’s published articles on Open Dialogue as scientifically worthless. He described me as the “Donald Trump of Antipsychiatry,” and while I wasn’t quite sure of the analogy being made, everyone understood it wasn’t a compliment. He then pointed to Norway’s TIPS study as proof that antipsychotics provided a long-term benefit.

This study was designed to test the benefit of early detection of a “first-episode of nonaffective psychosis.” One cohort had a “duration of untreated psychosis” of 5 weeks before entering treatment, versus 16 weeks for the comparison group. Both cohorts were treated conventionally with antipsychotics, and then followed for 10 years. At the end of that time, among the patients who were still alive and in the study, 31% in the early-treatment group were in recovery, versus 15% in the 16-week cohort. If antipsychotics worsened long-term outcomes, Rþssberg argued, then the early treatment group—because they had 11 weeks of additional exposure to antipsychotics—should have fared worse.

“If you take a pill that shows you get a poor prognosis, then if you have an earlier start with a pill, you should have a worse outcome. Is that clear?” he said.

I presented next, recounting the history of science I had published in Anatomy of an Epidemic (and since updated), and then Seikkula reviewed the Open Dialogue program, with its good long-term outcomes. The panel debate was mostly more of the same, with Hald adding his thoughts to the mix. He raised a question that would seemingly resound with every psychiatrist.

“There are many patients that psychiatry doesn’t think need the medications,” he said. “But we don’t know who they are. And since we don’t know who they are, we could choose not to give anyone medication, or we could choose to give everyone medication. Psychiatry chooses to give everyone medication. We give neuroleptics to people that we see do not get better with their psychotic symptoms. But they still keep getting neuroleptics. So how come they keep getting neuroleptics if they don’t get better?”

Afterwards, I asked Plyhn his thoughts about the debate. I was a little dispirited, in large part because I thought it had shown once again how difficult it is to have a public discussion about the merits of psychiatric drugs, but Plyhn took a longer view. Shifts in societal thinking—which is necessary for this medication-free initiative to gain public support—come slowly.

“My impression is that there is a growing concern among some psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses regarding how evidence-based the expanding use of psychotropic drugs actually is,” he said. “The conferences we have had will hopefully contribute to some rethinking” of their use.

The TIPS Study in Review

After the debate, I did regret that I hadn’t found the time to discuss the TIPS study in detail, given that RĂžssberg had presented it as evidence of the long-term effectiveness of antipsychotics. The study had been designed to assess the effectiveness of early treatment, rather than the long-term effects of such drugs, and although there were patients in both cohorts who stopped taking antipsychotics, there had been no reporting of 10-year outcomes grouped by medication use. There also was reason to question whether the early-treatment group had better outcomes. The comparative group was older and more severely ill at baseline, yet their symptomatology was similar to the early-treatment group at 10 years and a higher percentage in this group were “living  independently” at the end of the study. But more to the point, the outcomes in the early-treatment group, which emphasized immediate and long-term use of antipsychotics, didn’t tell of an effective form of care.

This was a study of younger patients experiencing a first episode of psychosis, and often such episodes may clear up on their own with time. There were 141 patients in the early-treatment group, and at the end of 10 years, here were their collective outcomes:

  • 12 had died (9%)
  • 28 had dropped out and were lost to treatment (20%)
  • 70 were still in the study and had not recovered (50%)
  • 31 were still in the study and had recovered (22%)

In other words, once the outcomes for the patients who died or were lost to treatment were added to the findings, nearly 80% hadn’t fared well (if being lost to treatment is seen as a poor outcome.) This outcome stands in sharp contrast to longer-term outcomes with Open Dialogue therapy in northern Finland, where at the end of five years 80% are working or back in school, asymptomatic, and off antipsychotics. I wished that I had prepared a slide comparing the two, and asked the Norwegian audience which of the two programs they preferred to embrace.

That data alone would have made for a more interesting public discussion, but then, a few weeks later, a study was published that added new information about the TIPS study. In order to gain insight into the recovery process, TIPS researchers—a team that included Tor Larsen from Stavanger University—interviewed a sample of 20 “fully recovered” patients from their program. While many of the 20 said they thought antipsychotics were helpful during the acute phase of treatment, long-term use was “considered to compromise the contribution of individual effort in recovery,” and was “perceived to reduce likelihood of functional recovery,” the researchers reported.

Seven of the 20 fully recovered patients had refused to take antipsychotics from the beginning, and thus had “never used” the drugs. Another seven had stopped taking them, meaning that 14 of the 20 fully recovered patients interviewed for the study were off antipsychotics. Rþssberg had cited the TIPS study as evidence that argued against the medicine-free initiative, but this outcome data told of “full recovery” in patients treated initially without antipsychotics and in patients who tapered from the medications, the twin forms of care that the initiative is meant to provide.

Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs

As the debate revealed, the implementation of the Health Ministry’s medication-free directive is in flux. In Tromsþ, where Magnus Hald is the director of psychiatric services, the regional health authority has opened a ward dedicated to such care. In the rest of the country, the regional health authorities are setting aside individual beds for medicine-free care, and mostly reserving the six beds for non-psychotic patients, which means that the initiative isn’t serving as an alternative to forced treatment with antipsychotics.

Even so, the directive is a mandate for change, and the day after the debate, I drove with Einar Plyhn and Inge Brorson, one of the board members of Stiftelsen Humania , to Lier Hospital, 25 miles southwest of Oslo, to meet with the group at Vestre Viken Trust developing medicine-free treatment for the Southern and Eastern Regional Health Authority. Brorson used to work at the trust, which operates several psychiatric hospitals and provides services to a region with about 500,000 residents (about 1/10th of the Norwegian population), and he had helped stir up interest in the initiative by encouraging the psychiatrists and clinical staff there to investigate the medical literature regarding the long-term effects of psychiatric drugs.

Psychologist Geir Nyvoll, who led the meeting, began by referring to this body of scientific research. He had taken a four-month leave from work to closely study the research literature for neuroleptics, and then he and psychiatrist Odd Skinnemoen had presented their findings to the clinic. “Knowledge and awareness is the foundation of change,” he said. “This is where we are.”

As a first step toward creating such change, the trust is developing a “continual improvement program,” which it has titled “Right and Reduced Use of Medications.” Under the program, staff will prescribe psychiatric drugs in lower doses; carefully monitor drug side effects; avoid the use of medication when “treating normal problems in life, such as for negative life events;” and discontinue medications when they aren’t producing a good effect.

In response to the health minister’s directive, the trust has set up one medication-free bed at Lier Hospital for psychotic patients, and five such beds at two other hospitals for patients with less severe disorders. The trust is embracing the principle that “patients should have the right to choose treatment without medication,” said psychiatrist Torgeir Vethe.

“Every patient should have that possibility. And if a patient does not want to use medication, we should give the best help we can, even though we as professionals might say the best treatment is if you use medication.”

With these two “parallel” efforts now underway, the trust is organizing a research program to assess their effectiveness. The hope is that this will provide a better “evidence base” for the medicine-free initiative, and for “shared decision-making” with patients. “So we are wondering, are we on the threshold of something new?” asked psychologist Bror Just Andersen.

The trust has already developed a research record for what it calls basal exposure therapy, which it introduced in 2007 with the goal of reducing polypharmacy in “treatment resistant” patients. The belief behind this therapy is that hospitals “over-regulate” psychiatric patients, which means that staff are constantly controlling their behavior and helping them to avoid situations that provoke an “existential catastrophic anxiety,” said psychologist Didrik Heggdal. With basal exposure therapy, the goal is the opposite. They “under-regulate” the patients, forcing them to seek out staff when they want help and encouraging them to confront their existential anxiety.

“We give the patient freedom,” Heggdal said. “The level of control is extremely low at the ward. We treat the patient as an adult, as an equal and with the respect for a person who is there to work with himself or herself. We are there to assist them in this work with themselves. And when we do this, they mobilize their resources. We shouldn’t be surprised.”

In a study of 38 patients treated with basal exposure therapy (14 of whom had a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis), their use of antipsychotics and other psychiatric drugs notably declined over the course of 13 months. Nine of the 26 who came into the study on antipsychotics were off such drugs by the end; 7 of 10 on mood stabilizers (antiepileptics) successfully discontinued those medications.

Vethe, Andersen, Heggdal and others spoke of how they thought they were entering a new era of care, which presented both opportunities and challenges. The challenges were familiar ones: colleagues who were skeptical of what they were doing; societal expectations that they use antipsychotics to handle “violent” patients; and worries that if they didn’t follow accepted standards of care and something went wrong, they could end up in trouble with regulators. Their concerns were many, but the bottom line, several said, was that they felt they were approaching “new and better times.”

“I have been in this business for 35 years as a clinical psychiatrist and director, and I am very grateful that I can take part in the change that is slowly coming to psychiatry now, because it was really, really needed,” said psychiatrist Carsten Bjerke, chief medical officer of Blakstad Psychiatric Hospital.

A Paradigm Shift in Full Swing

During the last few years, the Open Dialogue program in Tornio, Finland has come to be seen in the U.S. and other countries as a therapy that offers the promise of treating psychotic patients in a new way, which can lead to much improved long-term outcomes and involves prescribing antipsychotics in a cautious, selective manner. Perhaps not surprisingly, Magnus Hald’s thinking and beliefs—and thus the ideology present on the Tromsþ ward for medication-free treatment—are closely aligned with the Open Dialogue approach.

Magnus Hald

Hald was close friends with Tom Andersen, a professor of social psychiatry at the University of TromsĂž who is often remembered today as a founder of “dialogical” and “reflective” processes. They began working together in the late 1970s, and as they developed “reflective teams,” they incorporated the Milan approach to family therapy—which involved “systemic thinking and practices”—into their work. A key principle of this approach, Hald has written, is that “people change according to circumstances around them, and important parts of these circumstances consist of their family life in the local community.” The two traveled widely, teaching their new ways, and during the 1980s, they developed a relationship with Jaakko Seikkula and the Open Dialogue team in Tornio, Finland.

In subsequent years, the Finnish group was better able to document their outcomes with dialogical practices because they believed in psychiatric diagnosis, or at least believed in the use of DSM III diagnoses for reporting outcomes, whereas the Tromsþ group did not, Hald said. In Tromsþ, they also didn’t focus as much on limiting the use of antipsychotics, even though Andersen became “more and more opposed” to their use. “In terms of not using drugs, it was difficult to practice, and we didn’t have a real commitment to that part,” he said.

Even so, Hald had seen people with different types of psychiatric symptoms do well without drugs, and it was this past philosophy and experience that made him eager to embrace the health minister’s directive. “For me, it’s a possibility to organize something that is very clear cut. We should give people the possibility to choose not to be treated with neuroleptics when they are experiencing a serious mental problem. I always thought this was a good idea.”

With Hald enthusiastic about the mandate, the Northern Regional Health Authority has given the University Hospital of North Norway an annual budget of 20 million Norwegian kroner ($2.4 million U.S.) to run the six-bed, medicine-free ward at its ÅsgĂ„rd facility. This support allowed Hald and his hospital to start from scratch in hiring staff, with Merete Astrup, a psychiatric nurse, starting work as director of the ward last August. She had always wanted to work in a setting that provided patients with the right to “choose” whether they wanted to take medications, and that attitude is now present with all of the staff, which will number 21 when hiring is complete.

“I am so happy to be here, and know I am working the way my heart wants to work,” said art therapist and nurse Eivor Meisler. “I have been dreaming about working without medications.”

Tore ØdegÄrd

Tore ØdegĂ„rd, a psychiatric nurse, said that he had grown resistant to working on wards where people were regularly coerced, which is why he jumped at the chance to work here. “I would argue with people to get them to take their drugs. I was a part of that system, and now I am part of a system that does not have as its main purpose to give drugs, but to help people cope with problems, and do so without medication. I find that very fascinating, and it is a privilege to be part of this.”

And then ØdegĂ„rd shrugged his shoulders: “But we really don’t know how to do this yet. People want to come here to get off drugs, and that can be a struggle, with different problems. The psychiatrist will say, ‘We have not been educated to get people off drugs, just to add drugs.’ We have to experience this, and learn how to get people off drugs.”

One of the staff who has such experience is Stian Omar Kistrand. He struggled with drug addiction from 2001 to 2002, which turned into bouts of mania, depression, suicidal thoughts, and hearing voices. His own path to recovery, he said, came “from searching into my history. I realize that I have to accept everything, and then I wake up one morning, and the world is totally different. I have seen the light about having to accept everything in my past and my life.”

Stian Omar Kistrand

He sees the people coming to this ward through that perspective. “The people who come here don’t want medication. This is their deepest wish. We say, ‘you can come to us, we want you as you are, come to us with your delusions, your illness, your thoughts and feelings and history—everything is good.’ We can meet them as they are. When people experience that, something essential happens. It takes away the mistrust and the fear, and says to the person, this is okay. And then the person can start growing. That is the most important thing.”

The ward is not yet serving as an alternative to forced drug treatment. The patients come here as referrals from other hospitals and psychiatric settings, and they can get transferred here only if they ask for this care and their supervising psychiatrist agrees to it. But once they are here, they are now in a patient-centered environment, which provides them with autonomy. There are no closed doors, and they are free to check themselves out and go home, if that is what they want. And while they are staying here, they can organize their time as they wish. One of the days I was there, the patients took off midday to go shopping in town.

The rooms on the six-bed ward are fairly spartan, each with a single bed and a writing desk, mindful of a dorm room at college. Meals are prepared in a kitchen on the ward and served in a large common room, where people often pass the time talking, the windows framing a soothing landscape of sea and snow-capped mountains to the west. The sun had made its first winter appearance only a week or so before I arrived, and yet the afternoon light now lingered for hours, bathing the mountains in a soft pink glow.

The therapeutic programs make for a day that unfolds in a fairly lazy, gentle way. Reflective therapy sessions, daily walks in the chilled air, and exercise in a gymnasium downstairs are all part of a weekly schedule. As this “therapy” occurs, the patients write up their own accounts of how it has gone, which become part of their health records.

“This gives us much better insight into the perspective of the patient,” said Dora Schmidt Stendal, a psychiatrist nurse and art therapist. “Normally (in past settings), I would write a report of a conversation, and I had thought that I was carrying the voice of my patients, but the voice of patients on their own terms is so different. We have to pay respect to their world when they get a chance to express themselves freely. This documentation makes us more aware of their perspectives.”

The patients also get to see what the therapists write. “You have to think very carefully about what you write,” Stendal said. “Patients may not agree, and then you can have a conversation about it. Their opinion matters. They are being taken seriously.”

Although the staff don’t use DSM diagnoses to describe their patients, the patients do arrive on the ward with such categorizations, and the four that were here when I visited could be described—in DSM terms—of struggling with depression, mania, and bipolar disorder, with one or two having “psychotic” symptoms. One spoke of being a lightning rod for evil in the world, while another told of terrors that come visiting in the night. Three of the four were willing to sit with me and tell their stories.

*****

Merete Hammari Haddad, who is part Sami (the indigenous people of northern Norway), has lived with a diagnosis of “bipolar” for nearly a decade.

For the first part of her adult life, all had gone fairly well. She worked as a teacher and for a time as a school principal, and had earned a master’s degree, her research focusing on how people achieved their highest potential. She got involved in coaching others, residing for a time in Dublin and then Oslo. “I was succeeding,” she said.

Merete Hammari Haddad

Her husband is also part Sami, and some time ago, they moved back to Alta, a Sami community on Norway’s northern coast. Like many indigenous people, the Sami community has struggled to maintain its culture and self-governance, and when Merete moved back to Alta, she was intent on helping the community become more optimistic and happy. “I came in so cheerful, and I wanted to bring that to my community. But I was naïve. People didn’t want that, and I got attacked. I was so stupid. I turned negative about myself. My husband saw changes in me, only he doesn’t like to talk. I felt alone.”

Eventually, her husband had her hospitalized. She was told she was bipolar and that she would have to take lithium for the rest of her life. “I felt terrible on the drug,” she said. “I had no feelings. It was just like not living.”

Two years ago, she decided that she couldn’t go on like this anymore. “I needed to feel happy again. I wanted to feel glad again. And I accepted my feelings. I knew my sorrows, my fears. When I stopped, I could feel. I could let my tears flow, and I could fill the room with my sorrows. But nobody accepted it. Not my family, not my husband. I just had to trust in myself.”

The time that followed continued to be tumultuous. Her familial relationships, and her relationship to her community, remained strained. Even so, she continued thinking about how she could help “people realize their human potential,” and this past December, she started a company to pursue that end, obtaining a government grant of 100,000 kroner to do research on the topic. But as she pursued this business, her isolation from her husband grew. In late January, her husband concluded that she “was too enthusiastic,” and had her hospitalized.

“I was taken away with force in handcuffs,” she said. “And all I got was medicine, medicine, and they forced me.”

However, after a little more than a week in that first hospital, she successfully lobbied to be transferred to the medicine-free ward in TromsĂž. After five days here, during which time she and her husband had confronted their problems, she was going home.

“My husband and I are so aware now of what was wrong. We found a new direction together. We were here to have a new dialogue, and now we have a new direction on how we want to be in the future.”

In dialogical terms, her distress had been caused by the “spaces in-between” her and her husband, and thus relief from that stress required mending that space, as opposed to fixing her brain chemistry. “I just needed a bed, food, and care,” she said. “Here I’ve been seen, I’ve been heard, and I can talk about everything. They never said I was sick. Now I don’t feel like there is something wrong about being human.”

*****

When I was first introduced to Mette Hansen, during a group discussion in the common room, she had, with an impish grin, asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since. “When you look into the mirror,” she said, “what do you see?”

That’s a fascinating question for anyone to ask, and I thought it told of a sense of freedom that she had found from being on the ward. She could speak her mind here.

Mette Hansen

She had been first diagnosed with bipolar in 2005, when she was 40 years old and overwhelmed with work and—as a mother of three—family obligations. “I had no time for myself,” she explained. “I couldn’t do what people wanted me to do.”

She found lithium helpful, as it calmed her down. After a time on sick leave, she went back to work in a grocery store, and her life remained fairly stable for years. But then, in 2015, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and after she had surgery, she spent several months struggling to sleep. In December of that year, she “got crazy again,” which led to another stint in a hospital. Then last September, with the side effects from the lithium piling up—weight gain, swollen hands, shaking, and thyroid problems—she decided she would like to taper off the medication.

This was a dramatic step for her to take. Her husband and her family didn’t want her to attempt this, because the drug was “working,” but she needed to take control of her life. “I said, after 12 years on lithium, I have to try this. I am my own boss, and if my husband can’t accept this, it’s his problem.”

The ward, she said, was giving her “quiet” and helping her stay safe as she tapered from the lithium. “I don’t have to care about my neighbors or my family back home. I can talk about different things, the illness and how to behave. Merete (Astrup) is the first who met me with politeness. It’s something different, and that is really nice. I love it here.”

Now that she was down to ÂŒ the dose of lithium that she had been on in September, she was also beginning to question whether such a powerful drug had been so necessary. “I am a little bit higher. I call it magic. Lithium is like wearing a life jacket when you are on a mountain trip and you are not going fishing. Why should you have a life jacket? Maybe you need a sleeping bag, or some wood.”

As she looks to the future, she now sees this ward as a refuge, one that she could return to if, after going back home, she struggled again. “It’s important knowing that I could come back here and decide for myself what to do,” she said.

*****

Much of my time with Hanna Steinsholm was spent discussing her love for music, and our shared memory of reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and thoughts about Sal Paradise and his manic friend, Dean Moriarty. “I love the illustration of mania,” she said at one point. “There is a lot of pain and tears to go for what you aim for. There is always dark in the light.”

Her entry into the psychiatric system had come as a child, when she was diagnosed with ADHD, and also had conflicts with other youth in her small town. “I was made fun of when I was a kid. I felt something was lacking in me when I was a teenager.” She subsequently was given other diagnoses, and she struggled in multiple ways: self-harming, fighting with thoughts of evil and with feelings of anxiety about making it in the world as a folk singer. “I always thought people expected me to write a song that would blow them away.”

Hanna Steinsholm

She felt it was important that she could be here without having to take Abilify, the antipsychotic drug she had been on. She needed some structure, and help with her self-injurious behaviors.

“Being on Abilify was boring and gave me a feeling of hopelessness, and I didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t think on the drug. And if I am going to be in the world, I have to be smart and be a version of me that people like. People know that I am sick. I have to prove that I can make something out of the destruction, and make something big out of it.”

She had been on the medicine-free ward for several weeks, and there was no real timetable for her to leave. “I have found it better than I thought I would. It is easy to go with the flow, and not have them question you all the time, like they do in other hospitals, and with their suspicions of you, thinking you will become a killer. This is taking some time to accept, that I won’t be questioned all the time.”

And then we returned to speaking about the escapades of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, characters in a novel published 60 years ago and yet one that somehow remained so vivid in both of our memories.

The Challenges to Come

Such are accounts from the first few patients to be treated on this “medication-free” ward. But if this effort in Tromsþ is going to have an impact in the larger world of psychiatry, their patient outcomes will need to be tracked and reported on in medical journals. A plan for doing such research is still being drawn up.

It won’t be possible to do a randomized trial, noted psychologist Elisabeth Klaebo Reitan. As such, they will mostly need to rely on periodic interviews, which “describe who are the people who are getting treatment” and provide follow-up snapshots of “symptoms, functioning, and social activity, and other recovery measures” over periods of five and ten years. In a sense, the bottom-line outcome will be whether they can “make changes” in their lives, she said.

Skeptics of Norway’s medicine-free initiative are already raising questions about the types of patients who will be treated in the TromsĂž ward (and in the other medicine-free beds being set up in the country). The thought is that they will be patients who are “less ill” and without the behavioral problems—violent behaviors, and so forth—that “require” the use of antipsychotics. A medication-free ward can’t present itself as a true alternative to forced treatment unless it can take on more difficult patients too.

Merete Astrup

“That will be a challenge we would like to try to understand,” Astrup said.

The expectation is that they will work with agitated patients in the same manner that they work with all patients, engaging in a respectful dialogue with them, and that the ward atmosphere will provide its own calming effects. If a patient becomes agitated, they will want to know: “Why are you so agitated? Have we done anything toward you that would make you so agitated? What can we do to make it better for you?”

It will be important, she added, that “we not make rules that say, ‘you should not break a glass.’ We need to create an atmosphere where this is a place where such things don’t happen. And if someone did throw a glass, we will look at it as the community that broke down. We didn’t want (the person) to have to throw a glass to get our attention.”

Again and again, Astrup and her staff spoke about how all this is so new, and how they have so much to learn. At the same time, they spoke with confidence of being able to respond well to the challenges that will come, and with confidence too that their ward, since it was established in response to a directive from the Health Ministry, will be given a real chance to succeed.

Hald, for his part, sees this ward as a step toward wholesale change in Norwegian psychiatry. “Is this going to work? I think so, but I am not sure how we will do it. It is going to be a challenge. But if this works well, the whole mental health system has to change. This would transform the system.”

137 COMMENTS

  1. Great news!
    Regarding “unless it can take on more difficult patients too” is it a prison or a hospital? Is the patient/prisoner angry or psychotic? Those in authority call the persons behaviour psychosis instead of anger and drug them silent in their prison they call a hospital.

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  2. Terrific developments in Norway! It would be my hope that eventually they might lead to alternatives to forced treatment being developed as well. If the evidence from these open wards supported medication free treatment, I don’t see why they couldn’t be used on closed wards, if on a limited basis, too. Finally, maybe the potential of medication free treatment could spread beyond the borders of Norway. Anyway, I consider this good news all the way around.

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  3. Thank you for spredding hope and a positive vison without hiding the difficulties.

    I would like to add the following positive outcome of the discussion. KETIL SLAGSTAD, doctor and editor of the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association wrote “The inner conflicts of psychiatry exposed. The debate on drug-free programmes in mental health care concerns the nature of psychiatry – and what it ought to be.” http://tidsskriftet.no/en/2017/03/editor/inner-conflicts-psychiatry-exposed underlining the historical dimention.

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  4. This would be great news if mental distress is a disease that cures itself without intervention and only gets worse when the natural emotions being expressed are heavily drugged for extended periods.

    The real Open Dialogue is successful because it tries to assist people in solving real “problems with living” within the context of a clients life (at their home with their family/roommates). The real Open Dialogue tries not to pull people out of their lives and put them in an institution and expect their lives to be better when they return home (as if a disease is cured).

    This spinoff and others in the US seem doomed to failure for three reasons: 1) clients can rarely solve their real “problems with living” while believing that they are medical problems, 2) clients can rarely solve their real “problems with living” while isolated in a mental institution, and 3) the treatments are expensive and opposed by most psychiatrists.

    This spinoff and others in the US miss the central characteristic of the real Open Dialogue that makes it successful; extreme mental distress is natural emotional suffering rather than a medical problem.

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  5. Good luck with this as a viable model to apply across the planet. Medications have never now, nor should be in the future considered “THE” answer, but to dismiss them entirely is simply pathological denial.

    It is a fair analogy here, it is telling diabetics that they will never need insulin, just adhering to diet management and responsible weight control will avoid invasive medical interventions.

    You are just practicing “pendulum mentality”, watch the excess swing one way of too much meds to be allegedly effectively compensated from the opposing swing back of no medication use. All that happens is people get bashed by the full brunt of the pendulum swing at either end.

    But, again, good luck with this sales pitch, and start formulating the rebuttal when this narrative comes to a basic failed fruition. And explain to people who are harmed by believing this narrative why you meant well.

    Sincerely,

    Joel Hassman, MD
    Board Certified Psychiatrist

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    • I would like your apology too, since you are promoting choices made that ruined the most part of my life and even shortened my lifespan by 25 years !
      What are you waiting for ?

      There are more than 1 dietary measures that enable people to cure their diabetes.

      Even with a pendulum it is always a case of ‘how high’ the pendulum swings for people to experience any ‘brunt-related-effects’.
      Never is there anywhere suggested that patients who are (too) heavily medicated were given the option to go medication-free the next day.

      You create illusions and sell them as delusions that need medicating.
      You, JoĂ«l are nothing but a quack quacking quackery…

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    • With all due respect, Joel, the diabetes analogy is an anachronism, or should be for an educated person by this point. Diabetes results from the measurable lack of insulin leading to a measurable increase in blood sugar levels. Successful treatment by diet can be achieved and measured by observing blood sugar and HA1c levels, and if unsuccessful, can be augmented by providing the NATURAL SUBSTANCE (Insulin) which is known to be missing.

      There is no “mental disorder” which has a comparable known missing substance, nor is there any “mental disorder” with a known means of measuring success objectively, nor is any psychiatric drug a naturally-occurring brain chemical that is being replaced in measured amounts. There is literally no point at which diabetes and “mental disorders” have the slightest similarity, other than the fact that drug companies sell drugs that are supposed to treat them.

      And while I will agree with you that there are acute situations where the use of psychiatric drugs may have application, it should be clear to one as educated as you that there is not one such drug that does anything but disrupt normal brain processes (as well as similar processes elsewhere in the body) in a manner no different than using alcohol or street drugs used to achieve similar purposes. The similarities between drinking alcohol and taking benzodiazepines are MUCH greater than any purported similarity between taking psychiatric drugs and the treatment of an identifiable deficiency with insulin. If you want to be taken seriously in an educated community critiquing psychiatry, you’d do very well to leave the “insulin for diabetes” analogy in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

      — Steve

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      • With all due respect, I think you are missing Dr. Joel’s point. It’s not mean to juxtapose the specifics of the drug treatment for diabetes and mental illness (per your insulin is missing explanation). I think Joel is simply saying that people with diabetes and mental illness often both need drugs, and that thinking to cure them all or even most of the time otherwise is unreasonable and unrealistic. You have offered a strawman argument and seem to be mischaracterizing or misunderstanding his point. Cheers.

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    • Joel,
      Late but had to respond.
      I think at this point, we really are willing to see if alternatives like this work.
      Is forced medicine working for you?
      Are you afraid of it’s success? We gave you 200 years to show us your way of ‘identifying’ and ‘helping’.
      Why not give us 200 years to see if we can do it another way?
      And in 200 years we can compare studies.

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    • Joel, I’m pretty certain it is the psychiatric and psychological industries – the leaders of the “invalid” DSM deluded “mental health professions” collectively – who are “just practicing ‘pendulum mentality.'”

      Psychologists often play the (pretend) no med side of the, systemic child abuse covering up, “mental health” pendulum (since many do force people to go to a psychiatrist and take drugs). And the psychiatrists are the neurotoxic poisoning side of the, systemic child abuse covering up, “mental health” pendulum.

      https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
      https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

      And this systemic child abuse covering up “mental health” pendulum, is all by DSM design.

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

      But I do know that a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists have a bad habit of accusing others of doing, exactly what they are doing.

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  6. I lived in a therapeutic community for 2 years and had lots of talking therapy and group work so I could figure out my emotions (what had happened to me) and begin to get some sense of identity and build confidence slowly. The staff were nice, warm and would listen, so people could feel safe there and get better. We didn’t take any medication…

    So maybe they could do that in this hospital- listen to people and treat them kindly 🙂

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  7. I don’t agree with the idea that neuroleptics make people safer – I attempted suicide several times on neuroleptics and my behavior can be factually traced to the “medication”.

    People being forced to take drugs that cause them to kill themselves or other people, might be difficult to accept medically – but it is true.

    In the UK the London School of Economics estimates that each Severally Mentally Ill person costs about ÂŁ60,000 per year.

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    • Fiachra,

      I am so sorry about your horrific experiences with neuroleptics.

      Regarding doctors accepting the fact that psych meds cause horrific side effects, heck, alot of them can’t accept the fact that nonpsych meds do. It is like they take it personally if their treatment doesn’t work and causes harm. Easier to blame the patient instead of empathizing with their situation.

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          • I’d have to challenge that last statement — sounds like a myth to me. “Bad” acid just doesn’t work as well, like expired ibuprofen. Unless it’s mixed with something dangerous in & of itself. I don’t hear about too many people tripping these days anyway, do you?

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          • My cousin murdered an elderly lady–for no apparent reason. She had allowed him and his crime partner to rob her. They said they wanted to “test out” a new knife.

            I don’t excuse my cousin, but I think he was either on meth or going through meth withdrawal. Drugs make people do what they might not do otherwise.

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          • Your cousin will regain his emphatic abilities (if he has any) once he’s forced to get off his illicit drug-use. He then will be faced with the life-long punishment of not being able to give back what he has taken.
            However, people who claim “they wanted to test out a new knife” are most probably psychopathic and as such should be quarantined from society until a cure is found for this physical defect.

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          • My cousin has no physical defect. The only rehabilitative cure you can force on someone like that is to execute them or lock them up forever. I believe there is a valid, spiritual cure for him, but whether he chooses to accept it is up to him. No shrink can help him; certainly not those neurotoxins they pass off as medicines.

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  8. Thanks for this encouraging report. As a user of mental health services who got trapped polypharmacy, I’m very happy to see this progress but disappointed that it is taking so long to take hold even in more progressive Scandinavian countries.

    I am not optimistic that programs like this will be available to help me in my lifetime in the US, though. I do often say however, that the best way to end coercion and force is to develop non-coercive and drug free alternatives that work for people who are suffering.

    If people in Norway and elsewhere are interested in how to work without drugs with people who become more agitated and aggressive, I would suggest looking at what is happening in dementia care.

    Since anti-psychotics have a black box warning for elders, they are not recommended for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s who also have memory loss, delusions, hallucinations, anxiety, and depression and also may become agitated or aggressive. Restraints are also not recommended.

    Therefore, the field is somewhat ahead of conventional psychiatry with trying to find ways to both calm and engage people who are living with dementia. I am familiar with the Best Friends approach and Green Houses.

    Since cognitive processes are impaired progressive providers are using more innovative ways to use all of the senses to communicate and connect with people with severe challenges. This is happening now and is being promoted and accepted in many places in the US.

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  9. From Steven Goldsmith, MD: In order for any treatment to help mentally ill people become truly well, it must address symptoms as potential strengths, as experiences to be respected and utilized. Open Dialogue and basal exposure therapy exemplify such approaches. Other such treatments in my clinical experience are forms of systemic and strategic family therapy, e.g. the Milan school approach, and homeopathic medicine. Long-term psychopharmaceutical treatment does the opposite, viewing symptoms as adversaries to be obliterated with chemicals and depriving patients of the opportunity to discover their disguised strengths.

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  10. There can be no such thing as a “revolution in psychiatry” without dissolving psychiatry as a profession, any more than Guantanamo is “a revolution in concentration camps” because waterboarding has been discontinued. Psychiatric oppression begins the moment one is labeled “mentally ill,” as it is embodied in the label itself.

    Does Norway intend to eliminate mental prisons and psychiatric labeling as well? Does it intend to eliminate all forced “treatment”? If not, the alleged elimination of drugging, while a significant reform, in no way constitutes a “revolution.”

    And I didn’t see it stated that there would be no further forced incarceration or “treatment” by other means. It seems that Norwegian psychiatry could be cutting its losses to save its professional skin.

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    • First I have to respond to your concentration camp reference. As I can tell, your not to fond of Guantanamo Bay. Since that is the case, lets let those innocent Islamists move next door to you and see how long it is until you cry foul. Next, I’ve become as disenfranchised with psychiatry as I’ve read you are! They have gone “nuts” lol here in the USA, as I am assuming you know! On one hand, I agree completely that the over medicating of so called psych. patients has been a common and bad thing for longer than I’ve been alive! Especially at VA hospitals! I’ve been reading quite a bit about the changes similar to this for awhile now, this is just the most open example I’ve seen. Here is the problem I see happening! On one hand psychiatry seems to be moving more in this direction. On the other, at least here in the US, especially at VA hospitals, all patients now have one on their medical “team” deciding what you can and can’t do, even in pain management! WTF are they doing in pain management? Now, Pain patients can barely get help because of the “dangers” of addiction and the suicide toll is rising, while addicts get Methadone and other medications that are opiate based medications to stop their cravings, which, keeps them in recovery till they die instead of allowing them to recover! Drugs for addicts and yoga for pain patients. OH and the best pain management BS they are doing at the VA, Equine Therapy! Like I’m going to ride a horse with my bad back! The more people I converse with about this, the dumber it all is! Have a friend who had intestinal surgery and had no pain medications prescribed by the doctor for post surgery and nothing when she came out of surgery! But on the addiction FB pages, the addiction groups want more damn near worthless treatment and suboxone etc. It makes no sense! Most I talk to just figure that the sooner they die, the happier the Gov. will be! Talk about forced treatment! As the VA has been taking pain medications away cold turkey from pain patients, they offer them addiction treatment! I quit seeing psychiatrists and psychologists and just see my MD! He’s in private practice and I escaped the VA system as I have been almost killed three times there! Put in the psych unit when my liver was shutting down. Told I was lying for three weeks until I dumped my piss that looked like coca cola on their desk! They forced the 81 year old doctor to retire after that! Actually increased a pain med I was on to more than your even supposed to take and tried to blame me when I told them the problem! Oh and the one that disgusts me the most was that I had a brain disease! LOL. I told them, You just stopped my medications cold turkey and I didn’t need to go to treatment and had a couple hangovers in college worse than coming off of the pills. I asked them, since I never abused my medications or didn’t even really have withdrawals, how am I an addict? It was the way they did it, not that they did necessarily! It’s so bad in the US that they actually think they can diagnose addiction. Use some college drinking that was 25 years ago and (predict) my future behavior from that, no due process, and make a medical decision from the CDC in Atlanta! I know this isn’t really about medical care, it’s about power and control, but I will never see a psychiatrist again in the USA. Ever. I’ll die first! I think what would help psychiatry is that they have to go to psychiatric treatment, without the treatment knowing they are psychiatric students and learn what not to do! Psychiatry would be better off going back to the couch and not to tell the American public they know what they are doing when it comes to “diseases” that nobody can really prove they have! Addiction treatment, in my opinion should go back to the anonymity principle so it quits creating it’s own bias for what, awareness? It’s selfish of thewm because, people suffer in aoin now so they won’t steal grandma’s Vicodin! The pricks in the Gov. here, are making addiction the center piece of medical care and our lives are revolving around it instead of actual medical conditions! Oh just thought I would clarify, I was a CD counselor in the 80’s. Like 30 years ago! I quit as I saw more harm than good happening! They have no plan for when the patient gets out except modern medicine sending them to a 12 step program to find a miracle from God! I did enjoy the article and like Roberts Take on psychiatry!

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      • We here in Holland-Europe had a thing called social-housing which meant that anyone could be your neighbor. Because the trend here is to rent rather than buy a house, quit a diversity of people live together in the same neighborhood.
        I for example live in a small house in the most cultural divers ‘old-city-segment’ of Utrecht and thus I hear the church-bells ringing twice a day and every Âœ hour and once a day around 17:30 the mosque’s prayer echoing through the neighborhood. Especially the cosiness and sociability in the mainstreet, where Turkish vegetable shops and Moroccan, Indian and other small-restaurants convey a true conviviality, is the bestehst in Utrecht.
        Contrary to what US-news has told Americans, there are No-No-Go-Zones anywhere in the Netherlands or other parts of Europe.
        The fact that the towers fell is due to a deep troubling state of your own government. So don’t go marking every muslim or foreigner from the mid-east as a potential terrorist… America is already in such a bad state that it’s almost sanctified to quarantine the whole country from the rest of the world.
        Perhaps all western countries will suffer hard when the country-debt-bubble bursts but I predict that the US will fall flat on its face when that happens.
        People in North-Korea however will go on about doing there daily business as if nothing happened and have themselves a fine day…..

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    • Regarding “dissolving psychiatry as a profession”. The profession of psychiatry can never be dissolved as long as the law requires the accused to be “sane” at the time of the incident, presently and understand the charges against them. If both the prosecutor and defense attorney agree before a trial that the defendant is insane ( found not to be criminally responsible), the accused goes to a psychiatric prison rather than a criminal prison.
      I would say until the law changes , until court cases are based on the facts of evidence first Who, What, Where, How, then the reasons WHY the crime occurred are asked second, the profession of psychiatry is secure.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean

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      • Of course the law needs to change. Repeal mental health law, or more realistically, pass and apply the CPRD, and the rule of law again applies.

        I don’t think psychiatry can be dissolved as a profession any more than soothsaying can be dissolved as a profession, however, I think the science behind it can be exposed, and through exposure, discredited, and that doing so would effectively reduce psychiatrists to the level of soothsayers (tarot card readers, alchemists, palm readers, etc.) An interesting diversion, perhaps, but nothing to take seriously.

        Phrenology, the reading of head bumps, was once taken quite seriously, Now we know better. I think the same thing could happen to psychiatry. The kind of thing that would, at least, have a potential to pull its serious study as a field of endeavor out of the institutes of higher learning.

        I do agree with OldHead and Bonnie in some regards. You may get less harm, but the problem is of doctors harming patient/prisoners in the first place. People are imprisoned and poisoned with drugs. When the mental health system is closer to a penal system than a hospital system, the evidence is only going to do so much good as the object of treatment is not so much the production of healthy people, but that of the production of obedient subjects. It can’t really resemble a hospital system anyway seeing as we are not talking about literal physical health when we speak of “mental health”, it is always a metaphor, an expression of speech, and, therefore, a cypher for something else.

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        • I don’t think you can just *poof* wish psychiatry gone, and there will be no more psychiatry, however, I do think you can expose and discredit it for the lack of science it displays, and the corruption it embodies. Psychiatry has this power it has because people have granted it this power. This makes the task of anti-psychiatry, as I see it, the taking away of that power through the de-legitimizing of psychiatry. When it is no longer taken seriously as science, as authority, as judge and jury, as privileged caste, etc., as it is today, it will no longer be in possession of the power over people’s lives that it presently possesses.

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        • Simple exposure doesn’t get rid of something that can be legally imposed (though it makes people hate it more); you need some kind of official force to end coercion, which, as I believe we both agree, is the key to effectively ending psychiatry as a totalitarian tool, if not completely.

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          • Indeed, forced treatment needs to be outlawed. Psychiatry does not in itself equate with forced treatment though. De-legitimize psychiatry and psychiatry will be clipped of the claws through which it enforces forced treatment. Here the problem is that psychiatry is a tool of bad law. Psychiatrists are the experts who, through law, get people locked away in institutions. Get rid of the bad law that allows them to violate people’s rights with impunity, and that expertise will count for that much less. Without that power, their expertise should prove all the more bogus and contrived. My view is that forced treatment needs to be abolished, and psychiatry as a profession needs to be completely de-legitimized. This de-legitimizing starts with exposing psychiatry as fake science.

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          • I agree with Frank. If people only enter psych wards/hospitals of their own free wills and can come and go freely–if they take drugs and shock therapy ONLY BY CONSENT and after being thoroughly educated about the side effects and quite possible ineffectiveness, that these drugs aren’t magic bullets and don’t correct known chemical imbalances….

            If anyone is dumb or desperate enough to choose this “treatment”, at least they have been warned. I never would have gone on these drugs if I had known they were the same as street drugs.

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    • Thanks, Robert, for the update and for your work. That said, Oldhead is absolutely right. This is reformism pure and simple and while it will avail people in the short run –and so I would not speak against it–in the long run, it will not lead to a fundamental shift.

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      • Thank you Bob for this important update on the state of “treatment” in Norway.

        This update does point out some minor cracks in the current oppressive “mental heath” system in Norway and throughout the world. Your painstaking efforts, together with other reformers, has helped create the basis for some change. We should not underestimate this development, nor should we overstate how far it takes us on the Long March toward ending all forms of psychiatric abuse.

        What this article points out is that Norway is quite unique in that it is both the origin of Open Dialogue and other important reformist efforts, BUT also at the same time has some of THE MOST Draconian laws in the world regarding the use of forced drugging and forced incarceration in Psych hospitals.

        This combination of extremes in Norway reflects a coming Civil War over these seriously divergent approaches.

        Today, Psychiatry is an extremely powerful institution in Norway and throughout the world. It performs a very important function of social control against the interests of those fighting for radical change. It will not allow its power to be diminished, even slightly, without a major fight.

        There already is significant push back in Norway on the part of Psychiatry against these particular (relatively minor) reforms. This push back will certainly intensify as things develop. Psychiatry is hoping for, and will seize upon with a vengeance , the first instance of violence or suicide in these small programs, and will attempt to crush any further reforms. We must not underestimate what we are up against here.

        I agree with those who say there can be no “Revolution in Psychiatry;” there can only be attempts at reform. Given the oppressive power that Psychiatry wields in today’s world, and the fact that it is an illegitimate branch of medicine, I believe there can only be (and must be) a Revolution AGAINST Psychiatry.

        Richard

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    • Once again, Old Head and Bonnie hit the proverbial nail on the head. Fortunately for the world, the Founding Fathers resisted British tyranny. Fortunately for the world, Lincoln abolished slavery. Fortunately for the world, Churchill anticipated the destructive forces of Hitler and the Nazis long before anyone else, and he had the courage not only to speak the truth but to lead the Allied Forces to victory. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am grateful for the great work that Robert Whitaker and others have done and are doing. But we need to speak the truth about psychiatry, and to work toward the abolition of psychiatry because psychiatry is tantamount to slavery. Whether in its blatant forms, such as forced incarceration, drugging and torture, or in its more subtle forms, such as inculpating the innocent and exculpating the guilty, psychiatry is slavery. Moreover, psychiatry is a particularly terrible form of slavery because it carries out its coercion under the guise of medicine. It is oppression masquerading as compassion.

      “Of all tyrannies,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” This modern form of tyranny is in some ways more destructive than the tyrannies of antiquity or even the tyrannies of totalitarianism because when it deprives people of their liberty it does so behind a facade of benevolence. Lewis continues: “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” In short, it may assuage our conscience for a time to work on behalf of a revolution in psychiatry, and such a course temporarily may appear superior to indifference or to the promotion of psychiatry. But sooner or later we need to come to grips with the reality that human beings are being tortured, drugged and killed by their alleged caregivers, often unbeknownst to either the victim or the perpetrator of the crime. Those who know the truth about psychiatry have a responsibility to speak the truth, and where courage is strong, to lead the way for the victory of liberty over oppression.

      Thank you for the work that you are doing to expose the mendacity of psychiatry, the fraudulence of the psycho-pharmeutical industrial complex, and the threat of the therapeutic state. Szasz understood this threat many decades ago, but sadly his voice has been neglected or rejected. With the advantage of historical hindsight, no one in their right mind would advocate a treaty with the tyrannical King George III, a reformation of slavery in the South, or a revolution in Naziism. How can the truth be told in plainer terms? Psychiatry is slavery, slavery is evil, and evil appeased is not evil opposed. While I certainly do not call for violence, let us labor to set the people free. Let us Slay the Dragon of Psychiatry.

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    • Oldhead, I came upon this thread because I was googling healthcare or lack of it in different countries. What interested me most was the labels, since without labels there is no discrimination.
      And I am not talking about our neighbour whispering.
      It led me to an article discussing this change in Norway…no not change, diversion.
      On the week it opened, 40 people were forcefully given ECT, so that was a bummer to read.
      Obviously treatment such as this has a few scant beds and the rest go, guess where. “oops sorry, we are full at this nice place”.

      It would seem to me that one cannot go into this facility and lose a label. I guess it is supposed to make Norway look more humane because their track record is not the best.

      I did read that Luxemburg tries to provide better environments for the young, which seems to be helping.

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  11. Great news from TrĂžmso. I agree with Steve Spiegel that the adaptation of Open Dialogue and reflecting processes in the US is hampered greatly by our insistence that these are medical problems, by our continued use of hospitalization, and the professional resistance. I also agree with Diane Engster that we could learn much from work with persons with dementia. I would hope that in addition to professionally directed treatments there would be more use of peers, more emphasis on recovery and trauma informed orinciples, as well as introduction of trainings inspired and created by peers such as Emotional CPR, intentional peer support and WRAP. I would love to go back to TrĂžmso and teach Emotional CPR for their medication free unit. In my experience the best alternative to medication is building respectful, empowering relationships based on heart-to-heart connections.

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    • Do people ever “recover” from, or exit, the alt therapy industry? I’ve seen it suggested from way back, particularly in left-wing quarters (Freudian/Marxist), that therapy is everything, but I rather tend to take the opposite view. Therapy is a bubble getting ready to pop. Therapy is chronicity, and chemicals are not the only junk that people need to taper off using. Junk therapy, it seems, must have addictive qualities of its own. Anyway, the DSM with its behavioral addictions would suggest as much, but do you really have to peddle junk. Yes, Daniel, there is life beyond Alternatives. Less alien(-ated) life in fact. ‘Touchy feely’ comes with its own drawbacks. Treating the providers is especially troublesome as their need to “help” is so severe. Surely, somewhere, there must be an exit to this meddling business.

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      • I think sometimes therapy can be helpful. But it can also be as abusive as psychiatry. And it must be by consent, or it’s traumatizing and pointless.

        I fired my last psychotherapist for mocking my religious beliefs. She did the same to a friend of mine.

        Everyone wanted to patch things up between us. “Oh, you must have misunderstood what ‘Molly’ said.” The staff may have thought that. But my friend who also saw Molly knew I did right to fire her.

        No therapist at all now. And I honestly feel better. 😉

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        • When I first received drugs and became sedated and my painful feelings numbed I of course thought I felt better. Over the years I realize what they did to me. Therapy can do the same and be too much of a dependency. Being dependent on one person to alleviate painful emotions should be a temporary relationship. Because as they are only human therapists are not always the best people to help you. I find that being listened to and my needs met is all I require. Anything forced on me I will reject. It has to be my choice! Not the choice of meddlers.

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      • Hmm Hi Frank.
        I tend to agree with you, although I also tend to navel gaze. There is only one reason people go to therapy and that is they cannot make sense of the gack within and without.
        Many have no one to talk to, and also don’t know they are okay with all their gack.
        You might say that everyone goes to therapy, many are their own therapists. Obviously ideal.

        My problem is that “therapy” is a business and SUPER costly, and a part of me wonders WHY exactly if you really want to serve people, do they charge such ungodly prices.

        I tried therapists, quite a few, and I always stopped going because, it felt as if I was coming up with more ideas as to what was wrong with me, reinforcing instead of feeling better.

        Even on my first appointment I knew I was there because I was ‘sick’

        I also knew that I was taught that and also knew my brain would go round in circles.

        So I thought, hey, even though I do not like “psychics” and refuse to believe in anyone having ability, and knew a few things would fit within that great spiel of generalizations.

        I got nothing out of it, but I can tell you that I did not walk away feeling worse, and it was only $50.

        I know we do not need validation.

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  12. In reading about the “Medication Free Treatment” sign I am reminded of the only sign which hangs in McLean’s Detox foyer where I use to work: “Don’t Drink, Ask for Help, Take your medications No Matter What! No Matter what!!!”.

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  13. Wonderful article, thank you again, Mr. Whitaker. Person-centeredness, self-determination and strength-based treatment that allows the person seeking help to be an active partner and participant in their health. Looking at “symptoms” in a deeper and wider manner that shows deep respect and trust between “clients” and those providing support. The unit will be a challenge but most likely a worthwhile one. Best to Norway!

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  14. “The expectation is that they will work with agitated patients in the same manner that they work with all patients, engaging in a respectful dialogue with them, and that the ward atmosphere will provide its own calming effects. If a patient becomes agitated, they will want to know: “Why are you so agitated? Have we done anything toward you that would make you so agitated? What can we do to make it better for you?”

    It will be important, she added, that “we not make rules that say, ‘you should not break a glass.’ We need to create an atmosphere where this is a place where such things don’t happen. And if someone did throw a glass, we will look at it as the community that broke down. We didn’t want (the person) to have to throw a glass to get our attention.””

    Hmm, I loved this article, but these questions and attitudes mystify me. If they want to be able to help trauma/abuse victims ‘without medications’, as I helped my wife who has d.i.d., they need to be ready to deal with anger, hatred, vitriol, aggression, self harming, etc. I used the attachment theory concept of ‘safe haven’. I had to ALWAYS be safe and calm in the midst of whatever storm was currently assaulting my wife. And yes, sometimes I inadvertently got hurt in the midst of those storms, but part of being a safe haven is understanding that it’s not really about me or the present. It’s about the past, and I gave my wife a safe place to expel the pain and trauma.

    At this point she is long past most of that, but it’s because I helped her process things that she often didn’t understand herself. Don’t expect rational thinking necessarily. My wife’s pain stretched back 45+ years to when she was a toddler. She couldn’t explain much of it, but she did feel it, and thru her attachment to me, I gave her a safe way to release it.
    Sam

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  15. Great article. I would like to point out however, that there is certainly a connection with the dedicated advocacy being carried out by my friend and colleague Hege Orefellen, lawyer and survivor, and others including Mette Elingsdalen and Liv Skree, who have been using the international human rights framework since 2006 or so to bring pressure on the government to abolish forced interventions. They have worked through WSO and independently, and Hege now is running a pro bono law project through the International Commission of Jurists Norway branch, supported by retired Supreme Court justice Ketil Lund. By consistent human rights reporting in all the UN mechanisms available to them, as well as participating in law committees and consultations of the government, individual and systemic advocacy, and publicity in the media, this has certainly contributed significantly to the willingness of the Health Ministry to consider drug-free alternatives in psychiatry. As Bonnie and Oldhead say, it is a reform and does not fundamentally change the system; psychiatrists are still at the pinnacle of power. But I think it can be significant, in demonstrating that not only drug-free alternatives but also respecting freedom of choice and the right to refuse unwanted treatment is ethical, responsible, and not the bogeyman that mainstream psychiatry wants to paint it as. There is a synergy as Jim Gottstein illustrated in his three-part approach to change, between law reform, alternatives, and public awareness-raising.

    I also cannot refrain from pointing out a gender dimension in this article and the situation described. All the psychiatrists mentioned are male, two psychiatric nurses are female, and all the patients interviewed are female. The patients’ stories show quite a bit of gender oppression in how they got there, and the placement of men in positions of power similarly belies Norway’s stated commitment to gender equality. Dismantling the authority of psychiatry, in my view links up with dismantling patriarchy and other hierarchical systems of social organization; these dismantling are synergistic too and it is useful to recognize where the systems connect.

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  16. When all is said and done, speaking in practical terms, I can’t blast providing a drug-free option. I was never allowed a drug-free option when I was incarcerated and (mis)treated by psychiatry and the mental health system. They just had no hold on me once I had stepped outside of the locked doors of the would be hospital. People have been chemically maimed for life because they were provided no drug-free (mis)treatment options. We’ve got an epidemic of TD, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and you name it because people aren’t provided drug-free options. We’ve got that 25 years shorter than average lifespans because people aren’t provided drug-free options. Providing drug-free options is a no brainer as far as I’m concerned. Drugging people, on the other hand, in order to achieve a more obedient, conformist, and non-grumbling population is something I have real problems with. The issue here, in the final analysis, is about deprivation of liberty. Were our citizenship rights respected, we wouldn’t be imprisoned in prisons pretending to be hospitals, nor would we be drugged into demonstrating what somebody else considered acceptable behavior at the expense of our health. A drug-free option is just a tiny bit of a break from the deprivation of liberty you get in a total institution. It would be redundant of me to say, “Give me liberty or give me death”, but many people die for the choice, made by who knows who, of psychiatric enslavement.

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      • “The ward is not yet serving as an alternative to forced drug treatment.”

        So people are still being locked up and drugged against their will and wishes. When they are being locked up and drugged against their will and wishes, they have no pack up and leave option either.

        Robert Whitaker calls it a crack in the door, and it is certainly little more than that. This “revolution”, if that’s even the right word to use for it, is not happening for everyone everywhere in Norway. Carrying this “revolution”, if that’s even the right word for it, further than they’ve done is still going to be a challenge. They’re meeting with resistance, and the evidence has hardly started to pour in. I just wonder, when it comes down to it, whether the authorities are even going to care whether people get less harmful care or not, so long as the social control system itself grinds onward, and doesn’t come to a complete stop. A complete stop, in my book, would be to end the business of forcing unwanted (mis)treatment on people. Do that, and you’ve gone beyond these reformist measures that people have been complaining about.

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  17. As a practising psychiatrist, I must plead guilty to prescribing psychotropic medications, usually to the willing but occasionally to those designated ‘compulsory’ status under the relevant regulatory statute, for over half a century. I should also concede that some or many of these medications might have had unintended adverse effects, even though abiding with the basic Hippocratic dictum, ‘primum non nocere’. In balance, however, I believe these interventions possibly did some good to the majority. This belief is strengthened by, inter alia, Jari Tiihonen’s landmark national register based Nordic study [Tiihonenen J, Lonnqvist J, Wahlbeck K, Klaukka T, Niskanen L, Tanskanen A, Haukka J. 11-year follow-up of mortality in patients with schizophrenia: a population-based cohort study (FIN11 study). Lancet 2009;374:620-7] which indicated that overall mortality (after adjusting for suicides) was lower in patients treated with various antipsychotic medications compared to those not on any medication. Meltzer goes further and asserts that “at least one-third of the approximately 5,000 patients per year with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who commit suicide in the U.S. would not do so had they been treated with clozapine” [Meltzer HY. Clozapine: Balancing Safety with Superior Antipsychotic Efficacy. Clinical Schizophrenia & Related Psychoses 2012: 134-144]. The debate is, unfortunately, clouded by the oft-forgotten fact that the society has ‘outsourced’ risk management to mental health professionals. Be it suicides, or a mentally unwell Andreas Lubitz crashing the German Wings fight killing 150 people, or the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik seeking refuge in a psychiatric diagnosis, mental health services are invariably accused of having failed in their duty to protect the community. This just highlights that the issues involved cannot be resoled through an either/or binary approach.
    D S Goel, MD

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    • ‘Both/and’ is problematic in and of itself. The system expands, and even if you don’t get everyone doped up (an either), you get more and more people feeding drug company CEOs.

      Clozapine is the current excuse the mental health authorities give for drugging people they think would be too “deteriorated”/”sick” to exist outside of the hospital otherwise. I would call that something of a crock, together with this one study that you would cite to prove your point. One study, in and of itself, proves next to nothing.

      Protect the community from what? Certainly not from members of the same community? Otherwise, you can quit rustling your sensationalist newspaper stories. Everybody and their fifth cousin has already been there.

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      • May I make two quick points:
        (a) It might be a good idea to listen to the families of mental health patients as well, beginning with this poignant article by a well known author whose son eventually committed suicide, Salmon, T. (2006) My son has schizophrenia: why can’t the system cope? Observer (Focus section), 19 November 2006. Available at- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1951739,00.html.

        (b) Speaking for myself, as a practising psychiatrist, heaven could be defined as a place with NO mental health regulatory statutes requiring the responsible clinician to place a patient under compulsory status if the individual poses a risk to himself/herself, and should the patient subsequently commit suicide/homicide, hauling up the same clinician before a disciplinary tribunal for failing in the duty of care. The remedy for the much maligned ‘psychiatric tyranny’ lies in the legislative domain: do away with all such laws. After all, a patient of diabetes mellitus has the right to refuse insulin even though death would probably result from such refusal.

        D S Goel, MD

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        • a) Families are often the people most responsible for locking family members up, and thus we get out of them their own ‘conflicts of interest’, “dysfunction”, and scapegoats. Pinning it all on “disease” is a convenient form of invalidation.

          b) I wouldn’t equate respect for human rights and freedom with Heaven, and incarceration and rights violations with “realism”. I agree with you when you say, “The remedy for the much maligned ‘psychiatric tyranny’ lies in the legislative domain: do away with all such laws.” The insanity defense is a big part of the problem. Convict or acquit, the insanity defense provides two systems for dealing with criminal conduct, and it is unfairly hardest on the people who happen to get caught up in both systems.

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          • Frank,

            I definitely agree that:- “.. Families are often the people most responsible for locking family members up,..”

            Though my own family were quite supportive towards me (in my time of difficulty).

            But family members often believe doctors – whereas doctors are mostly unsuccessful at “Mental Health”.

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        • For 23 years on those drugs your kind call “magical medicines” I thought of suicide almost daily. 3 or 4 trips to the hospital per year was common. And yes, I took those drugs “exactly as told,” boot-licking slave to the system that I was. They did nothing to help me at all.

          Leaving the Mental Illness System and weaning off the drugs helped me quit wanting to kill myself.

          This is a personal anecdote, not a survey. But pardon me for my skepticism over any surveys paid for by Big Pharma or the Shrinks’ Club (A.P.A.) Would they publish a survey that reflected poorly on their precious pills? I doubt it.

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    • I’d appreciate it if Robert Whittiker could comment on the studies D S Goel, MD mentions as he seems to have the best grasp of such things.

      Annecdotaly I know a family who want thier adult son medicated with clozapine and he wants to come off it. He tells me of all the things that drive him mad. He tells me the services know nothing of these things. Same old story I’ve heard many time from other people. He is applying to the Open Dialogue programme in London where he hopes his traumas will be taken seriously and the drugs will be prescribed in a way that takes his wishes into account, which is what seems to be happening on these new Norwiegian wards.

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    • In regards to protection of the community, I would like to comment on a new development in the treatment of mental patients in Canada. It has long been customary for psychiatrists to ask a suicidal person how they plan to kill themselves. If the person responds that he plans to drive his car into oncoming traffic, the psychiatrist will go to the police and the person will lose their drivers licence. This happened to my son and because he lost his licence he can no longer work in his occupation and has been put on permanent disability. It seems very unlikely that he will ever get his licence back although he has never had an accident or traffic conviction. Although, I definitely believe that protecting the community is important I really wonder how many lives this new policy saves versus how many careers it destroys. Would a suicidal person really care if he had a drivers licence? I wonder what Dr. Goel and the other psychiatrists on this site think about this policy.

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    • Has Dr. Melzer taken a page from Dr. Who and built a machine to enable him to explore alternate universes and time lines? Otherwise how could he possibly know that precisely one out of every three people would not have chosen to kill themselves had X occurred and not Y?

      Science deals with what is rather than what might have been. Dr. Melzer’s statement belongs in spec fiction–not a scientific study.

      What can you expect though, considering the “scientific discipline” of psychiatry is based on a metaphor as Pies calls it? If I want metaphors I’ll read poetry–thank you very much!

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    • The GermanWings pilot was high on 3 or 4 Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. You don’t hear shrinks owning up to that. Too bad we can’t put all those shrinks behind the mass shootings on trial for the deaths they caused (sort of) indirectly. People who know the truth about these mind-altering drugs, foist them on unwilling or gullible victims, and lie all the time for $$$$$$ are the real menace to society. They should be locked up.

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    • coldsgeol,
      This might not sit well with you, but instead of my child being with a dead brain, I would prefer the alternative, AND whatever way that comes.
      Medicine including psychiatry ‘saves’ lives, so they say.
      Then the question remains, “what is life”
      Please we have seen the results of antipsychotics. They are worse than lobotomies since it is done in a hidden fashion.
      The person becomes too dead to be able to make a ‘negative’ decision.
      That is without a doubt not life, and the families agree. They always want that person back that they used to be.

      And I would like to add, if indeed psychiatry was there to improve a patient, not in a million years would you need a label, and if you did, that label would not cause emotional or legal distress.
      Would you like to be “ill”, and lose all rights because of something you did not cause?

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  18. Coldsgoel,
    “mental health services (psychiatry) are invariably accused of having failed in their duty to protect the community” and it should read “mental health services are not protecting the community as much as making the community ill”.

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  19. Is it possible to abolish coercive treatment? «Germany without Coercive Treatment in Psychiatry—A 15 Month Real World Experience» shows that it is possible to abolish forced treatmen and considerable improvements are possible. The rate of inpasients under coersive medication fall to one tenth i. e. under 0.5 %.
    See Martin Zinkler. Laws 2016, 5(1), 15; doi:10.3390/laws501001 Germany without Coercive Treatment in Psychiatry—A 15 Month Real World Experience: http://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/5/1/15/htm

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  20. So many times when hope of knowledgeable, empathetic and truly patient centred care facilities appears to be forever out-of-reach, a report on M.I.A. restores hope and re-inspires advocacy for the provision of such care.
    This report is one such source of hope.
    Since thanks and support are offered to all those committed and courageous souls who have achieved this opportunity.

    (Hope may become wearied under the weight of relentless,
    global guild-plus-pharmaceutical propaganda camouflaging the science-fiction, corrupted “evidence base” which has seen the egregious expansion of obscene power, abuse of absolute power and the last forty years of Drug-Dependent-Psychiatry” causing such appalling human devastation) –

    There is an observation which compels comment.
    Merete Astrup states: –

    “If a patient becomes agitated they will want to know why are you so agitated?
    Have we done anything toward you that would make you so agitated?
    What can we do to make it better for you?”

    What a pivotal series of questions.
    These should be included in every initial and subsequent assessment by each and every psychiatrist where there is agitation.

    Why are trainees not taught that these questions are absolutely fundamental in constructing a valid differential diagnosis?

    AKATHISIA is dominated by AGITATION in addition to the overwhelming restlessness and inability to sit or be still.
    This appears to be forgotten and re-forgotten in conventional psychiatry’s desperate urgency to apply a “diagnostic label”, enforce drugs that manifestly increase the agitation, pain, anguish and are a cause of violence and suicidality.

    Akathisia appears to constitute a critical knowledge, skills and awareness void in Primary Care, but then General Practice has been long deceived by psychiatry.

    Such diagnostic incompetence results in further fatuous
    “diagnostic labels”, then a kaleidoscopic sequential addition of devastatingly toxic, totally none-specific, prescribed psychoactive substances, so often and so predictably resulting in the rapid destruction of mind, body, spirit and soul.

    In 1975 Theodore Van Putten published an article warning of “The Many Faces of Akathisia”.
    “Historically, the predominant mental manifestations of akathisia have caused (diagnostic) confusion”.

    For some 30 – 35 years the propensity for SSRIs to cause akathisia has been observed, documented and disguised in pharma-funded, ghost written clinical trials with weasel words such as “hyperkinesia”.

    The ever-suppressed link between iatrogenic akathisia and iatrogenic suicide remains a subject to be avoided at the coroners inquest.

    Vastly expensive programmes addressing the “Prevention of Suicide” make no reference to the immediate, effective opportunity to prevent those suicides where the SSRI induced akathisia was initiated by a change of SSRI or increased dose of SSRI with akathisia then precipitating the “suicide”. (Death due to the sequelae of neurotoxicity.)

    Akathisia is a particular risk when introducing, changing SSRI/SNRI/”antipsychotic” dosage up or down.
    Also when adding or removing prescription psychoactive substances.

    Critically AKATHISIA is a vital-to-recognise component of neuroleptic and antidepressant withdrawal syndromes.
    For this reason, it is my hope that akathisia may be addressed by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence which has just published comprehensive proposals for a National Helpline. (U.K.)

    Perhaps these key questions raised by Merete Astrup may remind those with vile vested interests –
    (who will plot tirelessly to see this project of hope and humanity fail) – understand that real science commences with asking the pertinent questions.

    It would seem that those who are cared for at this inspirational centre of hope at Tromso may include many who are tapering off psychoactive prescription drugs.
    Potentially a group where vulnerability to withdrawal induced akathisia may be anticipated?

    With their committed history taking, accurate clinical observation and staff willingness to listen to, and value the observations of patients and loved ones, perhaps there will be two accurately identified groups who are profoundly distressed with, and suffering from agitation.

    In Tromso therefore, it might be expected that those within the akathisia group will not suffer the devastation of misdiagnosis.

    A valid and scientific evidence base may be established in this unit which might be used to actually train future psychiatrists rather than to indoctrinate them.

    Might such clinical excellence and accuracy at Tromso also form a defence against the anticipated and predictable establishment malice and condemnation?

    TRM 123. Retired Physician.

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  21. Thanks, Robert, for keeping us abreast of the news.

    I think this is a ‘Crack in the Door’ simply because it is a government mandate issued from outside the medical community. The whole mental health boondoggle is an incredibly well funded and electorally popiular industry.

    And it’s an industry that would be pretty easy to stop since the government is supporting this whole thing really. Just cease funding.

    As a side note, my family, who was so anxious to get me into ‘care’ after my husband died (and off their worry list), would never have paid for the ‘treatment’ themselves. If people saw themselves as actually PAYING, there’d be a drastic reduction in the whole show.

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  22. Next stop, a place where they will not use any DSM labels. That’s as important as the option of choosing not to have drugs.

    When I see people with 10 different labels, it makes me sick. Young kids and middle aged people with such monstrosities attached to their name. How can you ever help anyone, when what you do ends up having consequences which keep them in the illness role forever.

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  23. Wonderful! Collect data. Anticipate criticism of small “n”‘s; we will need to expand these services to provide a stronger data base. Just as Jeffrey Lieberman called Robert Whitaker a “menace to society,” expect the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries to fire smoke bombs to continue the deceit. An expanded exposure is now beginning.

    Jacek

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  24. Wonderful news that this is happening in Norway. A small acorn where an oak tree will grow and flourish. This is the beginning of what countless people have yearned for. A sanctuary. A place of peace. No restrictions. No insisting on cures. Acceptance for what you suffer from is indeed because of life and part of living. It gives me great hope. Thank you Bob for this wonderfully inspiring investigative journalism yet again. And today I will pass this information onto my psychiatric nurse who hopefully will pass it on to my psychiatrist. This medication free treatment on this small ward is the beginning of change that will bring about emotional freedom for many many people.

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  25. quote “While many of the 20 said they thought antipsychotics were helpful during the acute phase of treatment, long-term use was “considered to compromise the contribution of individual effort in recovery,” and was “perceived to reduce likelihood of functional recovery,” the researchers reported.”

    that is what I have heard that anti-psychotics were only meant to be used temporarily, just long enough to rduce the positive symptoms and then stop using them and follow up with talk therapy.

    But now all psychiatrists want to do is drug them for the rest of their lives.

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  26. People who suffer psychosis, delusions and voices and who are overwhelmed and stressed and not in their usual state of mind and don’t know what is best for them. It takes doctors and nurses and people on the front line of psychiatry. Some people recover with or without medication some don’t little is know about what causes these conditions or what makes people better. Doctors have to use the only tools available to them and quite a great deal of people recover on medication and some by ECT. I have by my own experience witnessed this. I can’t believe drug companies wouldn’t create psychiatric drugs without the side affects if it was possible. Doctors are working basically in the dark to help people like me and mine but nevertheless they don’t give up on us. DIY treatment is not for me and will help nobody. It takes qualified physicians and nurses. The psychiatric profession here on the NHS is underfunded and staff are overworked. But they don’t get back handouts from drug companies. It might be different in America where your health care is private. I am done with the anti-psychiatry movement it hasn’t helped me and just made me angry.

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    • I know many individuals like yourself who have been helped within the traditional medical model system. That is certainly a good thing, and each person needs to be free to voice their experience and satisfaction or dissatisfaction. I personally enjoy traditional practitioners who say to me what you are saying above. “We are operating in the dark.” That builds my confidence that I am experiencing a person open to working with me to find solutions for my needs, and not someone assuming a posture of medical certainty while minimizing my ability to make informed decisions. I have a hard time finding the folks who can do that. I am both a retired practitioner and a person with lived experience, and from both directions I know that there is truth in different perspectives.

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  27. Thank-you to the author of this article, a really good story. I like the Model, absolutely-no-medications…ever. I am in (and always have been) in pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, end of story. Medications do not fit anywhere in this scenario, nor will they ever. First of all the only story that I ever could locate on incarceration of people forced to stay in a hospital had to be abruptly discontinued due to the abuse of staff upon the patients. I ask myself, then why is this allowed to continue, forcing people to stay in a hospital and drugging them. It really makes me wonder how the people who are doing the locking and forcing the medications can sleep and night let alone look at him/herself in the mirror every day.

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  28. Coercion, drugging, take away your clothes…let’s see how you look in this type of outfit, your shoes, your phone, everything you may or may not use on a daily basis, then let’s see how you react, I know, better yet, let’s do an experiment on you, then write everything negative that you have to say in your ‘chart,’ without any forethought on how you are treating this person and their future of getting out of a place of this magnitude. This is what I mean when I ask myself just how do these people who are doing the locking of the doors and the forced drugging feel at the end of their day, not to mention how the people they are doing these acts to feels. It is an outright injustice upon the human spirit, it always has been and it always will be.

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    • Actually staff have never thought it necessary to take away my clothes from me but I would be grateful later if they took anything I could hang myself with. Also they take anything sharp like mirrors etc so other people and myself can’t be harmed. They take way my mobile phone because it has a camera which I also understand. It would not be right if other patients were photographed. Not because of abuse but because of their privacy and dignity. My nurses exhausted after long shifts sleep well at night and eventually after treatment and the way to recovery so do I. My liberty taken away is a small sacrifice for my and my son’s protection and and protection from any other incident that might occur while I am mad and insane that I would regret considerably when when well. Because of listening to people like yourself I have been verbally and physically abusive to staff when in hospital and I very much regret this now. You have no idea about madness!

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      • Oh, and are you a ‘locker’ or a ‘drugger’ disguised in your message as a prisoner or I mean patient? Then you say to me…because of listening to people like yourself…what are you talking about? I believe and never will stop believing that these prisons are very wrong, forcing people to take medication is very wrong and boy do they have alot of guts. To be able to be so very smug in what they do to other people then to be satisfied with himself at the end of the day is truly unbelievable. And if you are a patient who has your opinion, I do hope that you run as fast and as far away from that horrid place as you can and you do have a voice, of course you don’t need me to tell you that because you just proved to me that you are capable of making decisions for your life and destiny.

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      • I would be very careful when saying that sikyhcuks has no idea about madness. Most people who come to this place have quite a lot of knowledge about madness either from personal experience or from trying to help people who experience madness.

        I understand your desire to protect the system from criticism but the fact is that the system does an incredible amount of harm to large numbers of people, all with the idea that it’s for their own good. Trying to silence the critics of the system is just as bad as those critics trying to silence you and telling you that your experience has no value or truth to it.

        One of the most valuable things about this website is that you can learn an amazing amount of things you never knew simply by being open to learning from others, even those others who don’t agree with you.

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        • And by the way, the first thing that you’re told to do when being admitted to a unit in a psych “hospital” is that you must strip naked in front of some stranger, then you must squat, and sometimes they even make you cough. Real nice treatment for “patients” isn’t it?

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        • These horrid places filled with ‘staff’ that keep people locked indoors and then force medication upon them want for nothing else but to coerce people into thinking they ‘require’ it to live and they ‘require’ it to function, what a bag of absolute hogwash, I would tell them to shove it. Stay as far away from a horrid place of this magnitude as possible. As stated, the only study relating to forced confinement had to be abruptly ended due to abuse by staff upon patients. This study shines a light for me in what I believe truly happens behind those locked doors. And what about all of the Adverse Effects of all of those medications they force people to take. What about that I ask you? I know people can read. Is it that they don’t read the medication insert or is it because they are not offered an opportunity to read the insert before taking a drug. And how does another human being arrive at the determination to do this upon another human being knowing full well just what this medication is capable of doing to this person ‘under their control.’ To name a few effects of these horrible medications: Tardive Dyskinesia (a permanent disability) and Hyperlipidemia. Is somebody truly at the switch here? To me forcing another human being knowing full well of the these effects borders on reckless endangerment. Again, how can these arrogant, smug individuals can do this to another human being is truly astounding.

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  29. I have wanted to stage a protest in front of these places so many times in the past though have stopped myself for fear of being run-down by one of these ‘lockers’ or ‘forced druggers.’ This is all part of their grandiose scheme of their ‘do-gooding’ to others, let’s make people afraid to protest otherwise they’ll be a chasin’ ya.

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  30. Health care is different in the UK and under the NHS when i was insane i was admitted and told on no account must i refuse my medication which is understandable as there are massive withdrawals and i have been medicated for years. I am always given my freedom when well. Also because i have remained sane since 2015 i have the option with my psychiatrists consent to become drug free if i so choose. I dont choose and i find that 100mg Haldol Deaconate monthly in fact helps me considerably. Otherwise my doctor never would have prescribed it for me. I dont suffer any side affects at all. I really wonder if psychiatric revolutionaries really do know about madness at all? I have total free will and choice.

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    • I really never knew what madness was till Pharma-psychiatry got their claws on me. Started out with depression and anxiety, wound up a full blown psychotic thanks to anafranil/haldol/effexor and other crap.

      Found out decades later that tardive psychosis exists.

      Drug free for a month. Often I feel almost human again!

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      • Depression and anxiety are not insanity. Obviously you dont live in the UK where doctors are monitored and some quack doctor prescribed these drugs for you which are not for the symptoms you describe. And are for insanity not everyday lifes cares and woes which could be helped by talking therapy etc.

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    • Yes Bippyone, often people like you seem to appear out of the woodwork in places like this.

      One wonders why you would even bother with a space that is hardly shrink and ‘drug-treatment’ friendly…? Yet appear ‘you’ do almost more beaming about these toxic drugs (for those they are) than your gaudiest US drug ad.
      And I do live in the UK where docs will often write out prescriptions without looking up!

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  31. What i believe is that for full blown madness nobody knows its causes and there are no known cures. I do not sympathise with people who say they have answers because in this present time nobody has any answers. All that is known is that medication works for some people, not all, some of the time. The drugs are all there is and i dont believe madness is a chemical imbalance. Nobody knows how they work precisely. To advocate a ban on these medications and to take away peoples only hope is irrisponsible. Because people on Mad in America have nothing else to offer.

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    • there is hardly any real knowledge what ‘schizophrenia’ is never mind ‘full blown madness’! What exactly is that supposed to be even meaning?

      IF people report finding they have had ‘schizophrenia’ (etc) and now do not have to take medication any more, because they discovered alternative help, what do you see this result as, NOT a cure?

      If no one has answers, how come you claim ‘there are no known cures’?

      Yes we know the drugs seem to ‘work’ for some people, but what does this mean? Are they, like allopathic drugs, just addressing symptoms of a dis-ease. Is this why many people diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia’ can find themselves having to take the drugs for the rest of their lives?

      At least we agree that the chemical imbalance myth theory is a myth!

      I am not, and I am sure others here aren’t advoctating a ban on these drugs or ANY drugs. Anyone intelligent knows what happens when a war is waged on drugs. The situation is driven underground and the problems get worse.
      No, like the people at Mindfreedom (who went on a hungerstrike to protest the biomedical psychiatric model of ‘mental illness’ encourage people to have FREEDOM to take these drugs if they want, but also to have ALL the information about them and the myth of mental illness.

      Fast for Freedom in Mental Health Information
      http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/act/2003/mf-hunger-strike/fast-for-freedom

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  32. Lay people don’t know about science and medicine it is like people protesting that nobody should travel in space because there are hazards and dangers or nobody should eat because of hazards from intensive farming We ordinary people don’t know about medicine it takes doctors. And the mad yes are told like myself to take these drugs for the rest of their lives. Some mad people recover anyhow nobody knows who that will be. What do you do give up on people because some respond to other methods and the majority don’t?. As far as I know I have always had a choice whether I should take medication or not and I have known through experience about side affects. I still have a choice whether to take medication or not. I am fully aware of side affects. Making alternatives available that only work for a minority isn’t good medicine and will get people like me nowhere.

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    • So what about nutrition then? Did you know that medical people (not sure now. Some are becoming more savvy) were not trained in nutrition, so AS an ‘ordinary person’ you would have to look into this yourself. And what else…? IE I fear it when we are classed as ‘ordinary’ and feel we have to cow tow to ‘experts’. In that there is great corruption, because then you fear defying their authority or EVEN daring to question it, and this is why people WILL find themselves in lifelong medication for a condition which is not really understood, and also on cocktails of drugs.

      Yes some ‘mad people’ do recover and some DO know why. because they looked to alternative ways of healing. That is their choice.

      ‘Making alternatives available that only work for a minority isn’t good medicine and will get people like me nowhere.’

      That doesn’t make any sense. For one, how you you KNOW these alternative ways would only work for a minority of people, and:
      a) if that were so why is that wrong?

      and b) like I say, IF others do not know of these ways or do not have access to them, how do you know they would only work for a ‘minority’ of people?

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  33. And doctors do know what madness is and by full blown I mean unwarranted paranoia, delusions, psychosis, tormenting voices and hallucinations. To have all these symptoms is to have and be experiencing full blown madness and I use the word ‘symptoms’ because some of these conditions can be alleviated by medication. I am not aware of any other treatments that can give relief for the majority of sufferers. We can go back to the dark ages if you like but I don’t wish to. People can have delusions or paranoia or just one of these symptoms it is not a question if doctors or corrupt it is a question of training to spot these conditions in people when they go to a doctor desperate and in need of help. Some people are diagnosed wrongly. I certainly haven’t been. And what alternatives in fact would you offer a person like me???

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    • well why are you here, let me ask that? IF you so hate and distrust people speaking of alternative ways to heal these states, how come you have ended up here? There must be some curiousity on your part, right? Otherwise you would stick to the psychiatric drug promotion sites and forums, yeah?

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  34. I am here because only last month i supported Breggin and all those who dismissed the forcing of drugs. Now i believe they have a profound and very important place and people like me should be forced when insane to take them. I have done a complete about turn. My nurse has just left after injecting me and he used to work with R D Laing and he asked him what do you feel about forced medication and he said if ever i find myself mad i hope someone does give me these drugs. Why? Because they have been proven to work where nothing else has. But it was my therapist who against medication himself made me realize i would be making a huge mistake to come off it. And sometimes lower dosages work and i am not reducing or withdrawing anymore and am doing very well. I dont consult my therapist anymore and found him on MindFreedom David Oaks and realise i wasted 4 years of time and money on him and he knew nothing about what i actually suffered from. There are no proven alternatives and both sides of the spectrum the anti bio psychiatry and those who are pro bio psychiatry should get together and unite instead of fighting because the people you tend to forget are those who suffer full blown madness like myself.

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    • you seem to contradict yourself, and also to be quite rigid in your views, and not to have read people’s personal stories who HAVE undergone ‘full blown madness’ and yet HAVE been deeply helped by alternative help (as well as experienced therapists etc who have helped people too, such as John Weir Perry) and come off medication.

      I will therefore let you believe and do what you want otherwise this will just be a back and forth empty debate.

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    • Drug treatment can be harmful. It is the bio-psychiatrists who have made support for non-drug treatment so difficult to sustain. I have taken many of the same drugs you have, and my experience, on them, has been vastly different from yours. Tapering off these drugs is difficult because there isn’t a lot of support out there for doing so. I suggest that if you, Bippyone, look at the evidence, you will find that drug treatment is not the panacea that some people have made it out to be. Problem is, if you waste too much time before tapering off psych-drugs, you could, as I’ve seen happen time and time again, end up seriously injured, and that beyond repair. One question, do you think you will be singing the same tune 20 years from now, if, that is, you’re still alive then? Look into it. Iatrogenic damage often takes place while one is following, to the letter, a treatment plan.

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  35. I haven’t contradicted myself at all and i can name people who have been helped by medication and who have remained well if not cured you cant do the same by people and alternative treatment. You dont know anyone personally i do. I can name at least three people i know personally fully recovered with symptoms under control on medication. You dont know anyone personally who is fully recovered who had full blown madness who has recovered with alternative treatment because there is no such alternative. Talking therapy does not touch madness as everyone would be cured. There is no cure for madness just keeping symptoms under control. You know little about what madness actually is and its obvious to me you have never suffered it. These conversations are a waste of time as are all conversation with radical so called psychiatric revolutionaries.

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    • Not sure if you were referring to Frank when you say “you don’t know anyone personally” who recovered via alternative therapies, or if you are speaking to people on here in general. Either way, how can you possibly know who other people know, or their experiences?

      I personally have known close friends who were (misdiagnosed) with schizophrenia, medicated heavily and hospitalized, and later found out physical illnesses/ conditions were causing their “psych” symptoms (thyroid problem in one case and celiac’s disease in another, both of which caused motor ticks, hearing voices, “delusionals”, paranoia, depression and anxiety, etc). Luckily both of these friends didn’t buy into the “mental illness” diagnoses and were able to get themselves out of the grips of these doctors and got themselves off of the drugs, sorted out the illnesses, and are doing okay now.

      I dodged a few bullets myself when I had the beginnings of some physical illnesses and post partum depression/ hormonal problems that doctors were heavily pushing drug therapies for, and luckily I didn’t listen and found myself an excellent licensed Naturopathic physician, who I have been seeing for 12 years, so I can personally attest to alternative treatments working. I also worked in community mental health/ residential facilities for over 17 years, and can say that I whole heartedly believe and agree that psychiatrists, conventional treatments/ drugs, including what they are doing to children at younger and younger ages, is an epidemic and a crisis, ruining lives and keeping people locked into a system that really is just a penal system, that isn’t helping them get better.

      What causes “mental health” symptoms, is a complex topic. Trauma and abuse, stressful life events, lack of social supports, poverty, poor nutrition, all kind of other physiological causes/ illnesses, effects of drugs/ substance use (legal and illegal). We can go on and on.

      You’re right, though, that the proof is in the pudding, so to speak, we can talk all we want, but bottom line, how to help people get better. Unfortunately, alternative treatments isn’t where the money is at for drug companies and psychiatrists, medical doctors, hospitals or residential facilities. People getting better and less dependent on conventional therapies equals loss of profit for them, so that’s not where you will hear about treatments that work. Psychiatric diagnoses and drug therapies is where the money is at and what keeps people locked in and coming back, so that’s what they do.

      However, if you are genuinely interested in hearing about viable alternative treatment options that work, or for anyone who is reading who might be, I highly recommended the book “Natural Healing For Schizophrenia and Other Mental Disorders” by Eva Edelman. I have the 3rd edition with has a forward/ some good info by Abram Hoffer. One of the best books with some of the most thorough info on causes and how to treat “mental health” symptoms that I’ve read so far.

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  36. It was the simple fact i woke up and realized my therapist knew nothing about what i suffered from after supporting psychiatric revolutionaries for a considerable ten years that they have totally no answers and dont know about madness at all.

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    • I believe that the ‘symptoms ‘ as you call them can be alleviated by other means than lobotomizing the person in emotional distress. The biomedical model is the eugenistic method to ‘treat’ Ă  problem that should be disgarded as soon as possible. There is absolutley no scientific evidence to suggest that your lobotimization helps you to live Ă  better life in the medium or long term. The ethical evidence is overwhelming that we should abandon our present approach to emotional distress.
      John Herbert

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  37. I can’t believe it was an honest post either. Keep working on a new paradigm for emotional distress , l think we can expect mĂ©dical students and the like to masquerade as those of us in distress, after all it’s in their interest or should l say conflict of interest!

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  38. Can anybody direct me to information on how long it takes to come off benzos and what to do to alleviate the distress caused by this? I’ve got an aquaintance who is right in the middle of some fairly unpleasent withdrawal symptoms. What advice can i give him?

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  39. Great !

    We translated it in french and did the missing slide 😉
    http://www.forumpsy.net/t1509-2017-la-norvege-lance-des-services-psychiatriques-publics-sans-medicaments
    Did you notice that, the TIPS study outcomes do even not consider the people having never accepted drugs, 7/20 recovered, anyway they conclude saying drugs were useful to recovery ?
    This is cleary a voluntary bias, a lie that we highligt as comment.

    Great work Robert, dont hesitate to contact if you come in France one day.
    F, chairman, Neptune, user’s group of psychiatry survivors, France

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  40. This is another way of stigma, the stigma that the brain (where all our thoughts, volitions and emotions takes place) cannot be ill, and doesn’t need treatment. Of course there is sometimes “overtreatment” and drug companies try to sell theyr products. I will need to see long term outcomes from this unit, as the actual evidence is that in schizophrenia and bipolar a 5 year period without medication 95% will relapse, and with every relapse the patients don’t go back to basal functioning (even in bipolar). This place is good to minor mood disorders, some personality disorders and acut and transcient disorders.
    This is also the result of poor knowledge of psychopathology and a kind of fast food psychiatry, where most don’s have the time to make a good history of the patients and theyr families.
    As with every other illnesses, from other organs, medication can be good and make a big diference in patients lifes, when used correctly and in the right way.
    Neither 8 ou 80…

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    • jp.
      The reason they do not go back to baseline is a DIRECT result of part of the brain being fried.
      My take on it is, you have nothing else, so you use those big guns. You will never try other methods first.
      You also force, even when a person is no harm.
      The patient ends up never being who they were. You call it life if a heart beats, but the person is gone.

      To prove that the drugs do not lobotomize, take them yourself or give them to your family.
      Seriously, why study drugs on the vulnerable? Use the healthy people in psychiatry.
      No one likes delusions, but certainly no one likes the drugs until the people become too stupefied to know they do not like them.
      The brain cannot see itself. It can’t see the delusions and finally there is a damaged brain and body.
      THAT is not acceptable, EVEN if it is ALL you have. You can’t possibly in all rationality believe it is okay . Possibly in your mind you think a lobotomized brain is just the schizophrenia. And if you believe that, you are not reading the evidence.
      And psychiatrists always use the most severe delusions to justify all of the DSM and ALL of it’s drugs and all coercion, force.

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  41. My 38-year career in Acute Care, Hospital-based Psychiatry as and a Full-Time Registered Nurse here in a large city in Canada can be summarized as “ Nearly every client I worked faced relentless institutional pathologizing with false labels denying their basic fundamental human rights, their childhood abuse, and other forms of trauma, blaming instead the clients/victims themselves.
    I worked alongside of for the most of those 38 years, overtly Abusive professionals, particularly the Psychiatrists compounding a pre-existing sense of hopelessness and despair of those we were supposed to care for all the while feeding Big Parma’s parasitic grip on these victims of the sick, abusive, dysfunctional system that was created by these same individuals. It is all about Power and Control. To drug and have omnipotent control over a helpless person with impunity is addictive and intoxicating to so many of these Psychiatrists. Good Work!!!!!!!!!!

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  42. End Coercion in Mental Health Services—Toward a System Based on Support Only without forced drugging enabeling medication-free reatment

    Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), several UN bodies, among them the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have argued for a complete ban of all coercive interventions in mental health care.

    The response from psychiatry has mainly been critical, defending the need for coercion and going as far as accusing the Committee of “reversing hard won victories in the name of human rights” (Freeman et al. 2015) or suggesting that governments “ignore the Convention when it would interfere with a commonsense approach to protecting citizens who in one way or another are incapable of protecting themselves.” (Applebaum 2019)

    The authors Martin Zinkler and Sebastian von Peter conceptualize a system for mental health care based on support only. Psychiatry loses its function as an agent of social control and follows the will and preferences of those who require support. The authors draw up scenarios for dealing with risk, inpatient care, police custody, and mental illness in prison. With such a shift, mental health services could earn the trust of service users and thereby improve treatment outcomes (1).

    Germany without Coercive Treatment in Psychiatry—A 15 Month Real World Experience 2011 to 2012 showed that it is possible to reduce forced drugging by 90% (2) down to 0.6% on forced medication. Additional training of personnel could nearly remove forced drugging, i. e. only 0,03 % of patients where subject to coercive medication 2011 to 2018 in Heidenheim hospital in Germany. (3)

    References:

    1) Martin Zinkler et al. 2019: “End Coercion in Mental Health Services—Toward a System Based on Support Only”, Laws 2019, 8(3), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws8030019

    2) Martin Zinkler: «Germany without Coercive Treatment in Psychiatry—A 15 Month Real World Experience», Laws 2016, 5(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws5010015

    3) Responding to Crises – Alternatives to Hospital: Martin Zinkler, Kliniken Landkreis Heidenheim gGmbH, Trieste 23rd Sept 2019: http://www.triestementalhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Zinkler.pdf

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  43. Psychiatric chief physician damands: End Coercion in Mental Health Services without forced drugging enabeling medication-free reatment

    Since 2009 we have been fighting our struggle against coercion in psychiatry by using our special psychiatric advance directive, the PatVerfue, forbidding any medical doctor to make a psychiatric diagnosis and of course forbidding him to execute any forced measures, see: http://www.patverfue.de/en
    Our view is now shared in an article published in German and English by Dr. Martin Zinkler (chief physician of the psychiatry in Heidenheim) and Dr. Sebastian von Peter in which they describe how the end of coercion in psychiatry would mark the beginning of a support system conforming with UN-Human Rights.
    The article is published in English here: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/8/3/19
    Its title is: End Coercion in Mental Health Services—Toward a System Based on Support Only
    Here some citations as an incentive to read the full article:

    Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN 2018a), several UN bodies, among them the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have argued for a complete ban of all coercive interventions in mental health care (UN 2013, 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2018b).

    The support system will be obliged to look for new no-restraint interventions as soon as the traditional coercive interventions can no longer be carried out.

    The relation between the person concerned and the support system (mental health and social services) should always be based on informed agreement or informed dissent. Treatment and care cannot be determined anymore by a court or an administrative body (who may think that a particular intervention is just what the person needs).

    Instead, in the new system, a dialogue would begin with the person on their wish to be discharged and any problems that may emerge from the discharge in this situation. Mental health professionals will outline the support services available in the community. The whole process is guided by the will and the preferences of the patient.

    According to the Committee, forced treatment violates Article 12 of the Convention, equal recognition before the law, and several other articles such as the right to personal integrity (Art. 17), freedom from torture (Art. 15) and freedom from violence, exploitation, and abuse (Art. 16). The Committee perceives forced treatment to deny the legal capacity of a person to choose medical treatment, therefore classifying it as a violation of Article 12 of the Convention (UN 2014).

    Additionally, in 2017, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights held that “many practices within mental health institutions also contravene articles 15, 16 and 17 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Forced treatment and other harmful practices, such as solitary confinement, forced sterilization, the use of restraints, forced medication and overmedication (including medication administered under false pretenses and without disclosure of risks) not only violate the right to free and informed consent, but constitute ill-treatment and may amount to torture.” (UN 2017a).

    The Committee is equally unambiguous about detention in mental health facilities: the denial of the legal capacity of persons with disabilities and their detention in institutions against their will, either without their consent or with the consent of a substitute decision-maker, is perceived to be an ongoing problem: “this practice constitutes arbitrary deprivation of liberty and violates articles 12 and 14 of the Convention.

    Restrictions on their legal capacity based on an assumed impairment in mental capacity are no longer permitted. According to the CRPD, legal capacity “must be given to every individual by virtue of being human (
) (and) recognizes that regardless of perceived or actual decision-making ability, every individual has a right to be respected as a full person before the law with rights, responsibilities and agency—this is the right to legal capacity on an equal basis.” (Arstein-Kerslake and Flynn 2015). The task for health care professionals is to change to support only, based at the same time on the extent of the disability and on the will and the preferences of the person concerned.

    Renouncing coercive interventions enables the support system to learn and develop non-restraint interventions (Zinkler and Koussemou 2013; Zinkler 2016). Conceivably, the serious consequences of severe mental health problems like homelessness, family break-ups, and imprisonment would occur less frequently.

    We are not suggesting the creation of special rules for these cases or the definition of some kind of last resort use of coercion or some “ultima ratio”. In line with Arstein-Kerslake and Flynn, we believe in the principle, that “even in the hard cases, legislative response must apply equally to people with and without disabilities.” (Arstein-Kerslake and Flynn 2015).

    Traditionally, persons who in one way or another pose a danger to themselves or to others and in the eyes of their surroundings suffer from mental illness can be brought to a psychiatric hospital voluntarily or against their will. In many jurisdictions, the police perform this task. In the new system, however, the police lose the option to remove a person to a hospital against their will. A police officer may take someone in police custody, irrespective of an assumed or diagnosed mental illness, but they cannot take the person to a hospital against their will. The police officer would then ask the person if they wanted to have a psychiatric consultation, speak to a counsellor or social worker, or be admitted to hospital. Only if the person agrees would consultation, counseling, or hospital admission be arranged.

    The principle of non-discrimination in the Convention stipulates that persons with an assumed or diagnosed mental illness must not be treated legally different than persons without this attribution.

    The relation between the person concerned and the support system (mental health and social services) should always be based on informed agreement or informed dissent. Treatment and care cannot be determined anymore by a court or an administrative body (who may think that a particular intervention is just what the person needs).

    Instead, the task for mental health professionals would be to support autonomy by determining the will and preferences of the person and by assisting them if possible. This includes an explanation of support options to enable the person to decide for themselves. Trust-building communication will be essential: “We are here to support you and we will not force you to do anything you don’t want.”

    Most jurisdictions allow the police to forcibly remove a person from a public place to a psychiatric hospital. This practice discriminates persons with presumed mental illness, as the removal rests on the presumption of mental illness. Therewith, the law treats persons with an assumed mental illness differently than other persons. Based on the assumption of a mental illness, the person has to see a doctor or some other mental health professional in the community or at a hospital. The outcome of the assessment may then lead to detention in hospital.
    However, according to the interpretation of the Convention by the UN Committee (UN 2014), such measures can only be taken with the consent of the person.

    As long as the person agrees to see a doctor or be taken to hospital, these steps can be taken. However, what happens if the person rejects these proposals? Equality before the law (Article 12 of the Convention) stipulates that the person with a presumed or diagnosed mental illness has the same rights as any other person. The person may be taken into police custody only if the general criteria (those not related to mental illness) for police custody are fulfilled.

    Judicial determinations on remand in prison or on prison sentences must not discriminate persons with an assumed or diagnosed mental illness. Therefore, the duration of imprisonment for someone with a diagnosed mental illness must not be longer than for someone without a diagnosis (for a comparable offence). Likewise, for people with mental illness, the curtailments of liberty in prison should not be harsher than for those without mental illness.

    According to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and several other UN bodies including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, coercive practice in mental health services is not in line with Article 12 and several other articles of the Convention.

    In the new system, a psychiatric diagnosis will not lead to disadvantages concerning restrictions of liberty. A functional approach toward mental capacity will no longer be used to justify detention or coercive interventions. Legal sanctions for the individual follow a non-discriminatory process that applies to all members of society.

    https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/psychiatric-chief-physician-damands-end-coercion-in-mental-health-services/

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  44. BBC reported: How Norway is offering drug-free treatment to people with psychosis
    https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-56097028
    Psychiatrists and patients around the world are watching what happens in Norway, where the government has taken decisive action to try and improve the lives of psychotic people by giving them more power over their lives. Globally, there’s a reassessment of the way people with mental illness are treated and a will to reduce coercion.
    Medication-free treatment could be just another therapeutic fad – or it could have the power to change psychiatry for good.

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    • It would not work in other nations. It would only be brought over as a possibility of dialoguing about it. Trieste has been operating quite fine thank you for many years and only the vacations to Trieste and the slides were brought over. Oh and of course an education website that the WHO blessed.
      The Norway option happened FINALLY because their government was tired of endless harm with no good results. They were in a forced position because what psychiatry creates is not sustainable in the long run.
      Because not only do individuals get hurt, but as is with trauma, it gets carried into future generations and so a better world for individuals or for governments cannot ever be realized through damaging drugs or more trauma.

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