Mental Health is Social. We Need a Revolution in Care.
The peer movement of loving support works better than drugs and coercion
The medical model for mental health has failed us.1
It has made big pharma rich and richer, but has left the mental health of modern societies impoverished. The profit motive provides a motivation for the medicalizing of mental-emotional distress and trauma. Psychiatrists now overwhelmingly serve as drug dealers rather than counselors, analysts, and healers in the traditions of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Their Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is not scientific, but a product of unscrupulous politics and bureaucracy.2 3
Those in mental or emotional crisis need support, patience, understanding, love, and community safety. Drugs, stigmatizing diagnostic labels, and medicalizing life stresses that can be overcome are not the answers.
The medical model for the treatment of those with scary psychiatric diagnoses often involves involuntary commitment to prison-like in-patient facilities, forced drugging (enforced by courts), electric shock treatments, etc, acts that would elsewhere be considered crimes and violations of international agreements on human rights. What has held together this model is fear. Society holds fear-based assumptions that schizophrenics or those labeled psychotic are dangerous. The truth is those diagnosed with schizophrenia are more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators.4
The revolution in mental health needs to level the playing field, removing medical authoritarianism and medical kidnapping, returning dignity to the individual, and removing the stigma associated with mental distress. That means peer-to-peer support at the community level. More about the peer movement:
If medicalizing mental health crises had worked then mental health would have been improving over the last few decades, not worsening. Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs are themselves worsening these problems for many people. Heavy psychiatric drugs studied for short-term use have proved to be toxic, life-shortening poisons.
The biochemical theory of mental illness (depression) was a fraud of pharmaceutical marketing. It has been dispensed with once and for all.5
Sciency talk around drugs is not the same as actual science.
Some of the most inhumane treatment of people happening right now in modern societies is happening in the sterile halls of in-patient facilities and supervised by white coated psychiatrists whose traditions of treatment are rooted in fear, not love.
We Need a New Vision
We need a revolution of peer social support and community centers that are safe, loving places for people in mental-emotional distress.
If modern societies are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to stockpile weapons of war and mass murder, then we must insist that we can also afford community centers and safe spaces to support those in mental health crises (psychiatric drugs optional). Peers who have been there can volunteer or be paid caretakers in these spaces, along with professionals like psychologists who believe healing can only happen if we maintain everyone's human dignity.
A professionally run in-patient facility in Norway is following these principles.6
Listen to British psychologist Peter Kinderman talk about these issues in this interview: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/does-mental-illness-exist/9130774#transcript
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/969153#:~:text=The%20medical%20model%20has%20worked,symptom%20reduction%20rather%20than%20recovery
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rethinking-mental-health/201207/the-great-dsm-hoax
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686644/
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/serotonin-model-depression-repeal/
https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/12/medication-free-treatment-norway-private-hospital/