Great WaPo story and interview
If I could tell people to read just one thing this year, I’d tell them to read Charles Barber’s piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, in which he talks about the way that recovery involves more than just meds. It’s excellent. Here’s an excerpt:
Larry Davidson, a Yale researcher on recovery from severe mental illness, has examined the data and found that this model is flawed, at least in the field of mental health. “In the medical model, you take a person with a mental illness, you provide treatment in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then they’re supposed to approximate some notion of normality,” he told me. “Our research shows the opposite. You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them, increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place, and then you provide treatment and support. The issue is not so much making them normal but helping them get their lives back.”
Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill
Also check out the transcript of an online chat he did with WaPo readers here.
liz | 3:42 PM | Uncategorized
..You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them,
(That will take 100 years.)
increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place,
(Severely depressed people are not particularly interested in increased social interaction.)
and then you provide treatment and support.
(After they are traumatized from the social interaction and the stigma of mental illness)
I do agree that meds alone aren’t the answer but maybe I’m not getting his point as to what to do first.
How tragic it is that providers so often fail to realize that persons coping with mental health issues are not so very different from everyone else. We still have aspirations and hopes and dreams. We need reasons to live, to get better and even to get up in the morning. Sadly, the current emphasis is on internalizing that we are ill or very ill to avoid being accused of anosognosia (a lack of insight), accepting the limitations associated with the diagnosis, and achieving symptom reduction rather then realizing a meaningful quality of life.
I doubt the situation will change despite all the current shiboleths, ex. recovery, wellness, needs and strengths based care, evidence based care, self-direction, consumer empowerment. Too many of us continue to be told that all the answers can only be found in pill form for often this is all that is available. (One of our community mental health centers serves 2,500 in its outpatient division and 2000 receive no other treatment but medication. For some medication alone might be the answer but for eighty percent?) Medication is a tool but it is not all tools. Is there anything we truly value or yearn for which can be measured in milligrams of medication?
I cautiously — very cautiously — endorse what Barber is saying. But he is still dancing a tightrope (maybe even Philippe Petit’s tightrope between the Twin Towers in a more innocent age) in so minimizing the importance of medication.
BTW, I agree with your reader about that, while Barber’s citation of research that schizophrenics in Third World countries benefit medically from the support of family and friends is accurate, it is desperately naive to think First World stigma will end soon. (People make fun of Tom Cruise, but they secretly believe him.)
Finally, here’s one more follow-up to the Barber article (HTTP://)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021201028.html
Great article!
Phil – I agree with you. Meds alone aren’t the answer… and in my situation, the author’s suggestions (which were copied in your comment) would not have worked until after I started taking an anti-depressant. Initially, I was too depressed to even consider social participation. It was a struggle just to get up and go to work. I needed the medication to start decreasing the symptoms of the severe depression a bit before I could start doing that other stuff. My therapist knew that, and I would hope most of them do.
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