I watched a documentary on a couple of ladies back in the 60 's that were locked up in a psych ward for like 10 year’s without meds and finally recovered. Does anyone have a therapist be that believes this should be practiced more? Personally I don’t have the time and money or desire to go without meds and be hospitalized for that long.
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Recovery is possible and something that should be mentioned more. So many are thinking along the lines of cure which there is none. I’m just old school and focused my mind on the phycology and doing memory therapy. I think everything to do with mental illness and the treatment is controversial and I’m so over it all. The question is what do you want to do with your life and that’s what they (we because I refuse to call them them anymore) Want to help you with.
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I’m not willing to live with my symptoms full blown for years until I get healthy. It is entirely possible I may try to come off my meds in a decade. But I would only do that with full knowledge of the hellstorm about to be unleashed upon me. It’s a bad idea.
That being said, the first time I got sick I went off my meds successfully for ten years. This time I tried it again and relapsed right away. I don’t think going off meds is in my future right now.
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@anon93437440 has stopped taking medicine…!!!
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Recovery and meds are all on a spectrum. I’m really tired so I am probably phrasing this wrong. But if you do a study of 1000 schizophrenics who aren’t on meds you are going to have varying degrees of recovery. You will have some of them who recover nicely and others who don’t recover at all.
And it’s the same principle with a 1000 schizophrenics who are on meds. Some will recover nicely and some who will barely be recovered.
A personal example would be when I was hospitalized in a big locked facility with about a 100 other people. The facility was ten years old and there were two or three people who had been in the facility since it opened and they had been on meds tbe whole time… By the way, that hospital was a very strange weird place to be for 8 months for this naive, innocent 20 year old, but I survived anyways.
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That’s interesting!
I strongly believe in possible recovery without meds, especially if you practice that from the first psychosis and offer other means to recover. I would personally have preferred to spend 10 years in hospital and then recover without meds, than be medicated and treated like they did now. I’m on a very low dose of meds now. I think people should have the choice between the med-route and the non-med-route.
I have had contact with the Soteria home in Germany (i’m from a neighbouring country), which is my preferred place to be hospitalised in case it goes wrong. They have many of those in Germany. They let people have the free choice of going through psychosis with or without meds. If people are in real crisis they stay with them all the time to protect them. They have psychologists working there fulltime and actually talk with people (in the wards were I stayed in my own country they didn’t even have a psychologist or talk with you). Only in very rare cases they will use forced meds.
I have had contact with psychiatrists in the USA believing in psychotherapy for schizophrenia (e.g. dr. Karon). I have ordered his book, but didn’t receive it yet. He is supposed to report on research studies in it, showing that psychotherapy alone has better outcomes than medication or meds + psychotherapy for schizophrenia. Through him I have found a psychiatrist in Europe that I wish to work with and who believes in psychotherapy for psychosis,
My last psychiatrists were all strong medication-believers though and thought the causes for my psychosis didn’t matter, so they didn’t need to help me with anything.
I hope this psychotherapy thing will work out. If it does I’ll report back on it.
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It is best to take meds. It really is the only option we’ve got.
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I’ve been sick for nine years and never relied on meds. But I don’t think I ever have complete psychotic breaks. I come close, but always move away from the bad path. I get every symptom except that. The bad thing is my negative symptoms are very bad and i have other health issues, so it’s like I’m still living like a medicated person.
I don’t take meds… But my conditions normal/stable compared to a year ago when all I did was stay indoors and play games… still do that, but without constant voices and paranoia of outside voices from people.
Only time I ever took meds was back in 2014 - but only 7 months after schizophrenia diagnosis… used zyprexia for 2 months, but didn’t help… changed to a different med but all it did was make me restless and tired, so I quit it first week… been med free since
https://youtu.be/EPfKc-TknWU here’s that link if anyone wants to watch that documentary. I personally think there is to much to loose going off meds. This lady in this documentary had 8 years of intense therapy in a phychWard. Is doing good now. But it’s really not practical and there’s no guarantee you wouldn’t end up worse. It is interesting and if it could be improved on somehow could possibly be an option in the future. The ladies that they interviewed had lots of trauma in there lives so I wonder a bit if they just were extremely traumatized and not sz at all.
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Hey @77nick77 didn’t you live in the original Soteria House many years ago? I thought you mentioned that in a past post, but my memory could be faulty.
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I’ve never been on medication. I can’t say how things might have been different for me. I have every symptom I ever had but much more mild as I’ve gotten older, and especially after being in CBT (that was an absolute “game changer” for me)
I suffered terribly in my teens and early twenties. Would medication have helped? I often wonder. We’ll never know.
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I can’t function without AP’s period.
I was under a lot of stress and stopped taking all of my psych MEDS including Antipsychotics for a couple of months.
Then I went back on my MEDS but took it upon myself not to listen to my psychiatrist and took my risperidone at sub therapeutic doses.
Well being the idiot that I was and messing with my MEDS landed me in the Psych Hospital twice on an involuntary basis.
Now I am Court ordered to be closely monitored and my MEDS have to be managed by other people.
The Moral of the story?
Don’t mess with your MEDS or else …
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Coincidences on SZ.com, lol.
When I first got sick in 1980 at age 19 I was put into Soteria House. I stayed there a year with no meds. My suffering while there was indescribably bad. While I was there I saw some people get better and I saw other people go downhill.
I can’t really say that it helped me at all. Over-all I never showed any improvement or recovery while I was there. I got kicked out over a misunderstanding and then I was put in the hospital and I was given medication in there. I didn’t improve much but at least I didn’t get worse. After the hospital I was put in a group home and I slowly started recovering. I eventually got a job, a car, and I lived independently.
I always regretted that I was in Soteria. My recovery is OK now but I think it would be even more recovered if I was put on medication when I was 19. People are so varied and the course and severity of peoples schizophrenia is so varied that there is no neat method of treatment that guarantees recovery for everyone. Recovery is a crap shoot, a lot of luck comes into play as to the course your illness is going to take, it’s largely unpredictable in many, many ways.
If there was one method that worked for everyone than that would be nice but that’s just a dream. I think you see what I’m saying. Its almost impossible to see a young man or women who first gets sick and predict that they will have a good recovery no matter what setting you put them into.
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Yeah, @Moonbeam. I was in there in 1981. Kudos to the good memory.
Thanks for sharing the experience of the Soteria home. I do agree with you that different things work for different people and there should be attention to that. I think they have changed their practices a bit now in Germany Soteria home. They are more pro-own choice and pro-really helping people than anti-med 
Some people there are on meds and some people aren’t, according to their own wishes. When people are doing really bad they sometimes refer someone to the closed ward in the hospital that is attached for a short period of time, but first they try to work out another solution.
What I really like is that they use as little force as possible and they actually try to create an environment that is & feels safe and talk with people about their problems and the causes of their problems and find out what the best solution for that person is and help people to get stronger, with our without meds, instead of the standard violent lock up-drug-ignore machine that the normal wards in my country are.
It’s what feels better to me, but someone else might prefer to be just forcefully locked up, drugged as soon as possible and not talk about their problems.
You’re welcome. I almost wished you a Happy Thanksgiving, lol.
'I just wanted to add that in Soteria, even back in the eighties when I was there, kept a supply of medication in a locked closet for emergencies for certain people. I felt fairly safe there, people are people and there were incidents where people got mad and became rather threatening but I remember only one incident where someone actually hit another person.
The last thing I want to say is that the counselors, who per the credo of Soteria, had no formal experience in the mental health system and no training. But unfortunately, even though they held a position of authority and were functioning in society themselves, many of these counselors were as screwed up as the clients in some ways. And they were often at odds with each other and while I was there they were split up into two camps who talked trash freely against each other and in front of clients AND behind each others back and had the clients take sides.
I just noticed how negative I am making Soteria sound. I have to say that there were many positive aspects about it of course. Like I said, some people did show improvement, and there were very few rules, and I lot of freedom. Soteria was VERY tolerant of so-called “crazy” behavior, and very tolerant of people “acting out” in ways that any other place might not have allowed. The counselors were mostly young open-minded friendly people despite their faults. A couple of them in my opinion should have never been in the mental health people working with mentally ill people but their intentions were good and they still had something to offer.
I don’t know how similar my 1980’s Soteria House is to modern Soteria Houses but if you were serious about maybe staying there or if you want to know more about it, the Co-founders of Soteria collaborated on a book about the history and how Soteria operated and what went on in their for clients and saff alike. Maybe you want to read this. It’s called something like, " Soteria; From Hope to Deliverance" and it’s on Amazon.com. Its not hard to read and it is not too clinical. It centers on this one specific Soteria House I was in but you might learn something about it.
Anyways, have a Happy…Damn I almost did it again, lol.
'i meant to say have a good morning.
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They probably lied to get out