Pjen, it was indeed intended as humorous. In truth, the best alternative to traditional psychiatric treatment for the severely, uhh,
::searching for an appropriate descriptive term that won't ruffle any feathers::
...for the individuals whose thinking and communicating is pretty incoherent and whose behavior indicates a high likelihood of being dangerous to self and/or others, how's that? ...
...anyway, was the Vancouver Emotional Emergency Center, or VEEC. It was pretty much what you describe as milieu therapy, I think. It was a "safe house" run entirely by former psychiatric inmates and heavily staffed by volunteers who had been through it themselves. There were no psychiatric drugs or street drugs allowed on the premises. People could check out (i.e, it was not an involuntary institution) but if they stayed they were prevented by the volunteers from suicidal or self-destructive acts, or from hurting others. Sometimes, in order to do that 'preventing', some more general restrictions on an individual's behavior were necessary, but the overall tone was to avoid restricting freedom arbitrarily and administratively.
Alumni were expected to do a turn later on as volunteers, and many did. Regarding the HBO documentary on "Bellvue" -- did you perhaps mean to type "Bellevue"? If so, it is still an extant hospital in lower Manhattan. It still has a psychiatric unit, including an inpatient ward that you can't leave if they don't think you oughta. I'm not positive, but I don't think Bellevue was EVER a dedicated psychiatric-only hospital.
DocCathode, my attitude towards psych meds is "If it gets you through your days and lets you function, who am I to tell you not to take it?", which is also my attitude towards street drugs. That large conference room I described previously, however, contained many people such as myself, people who had either never undergone any prolonged regime with psych meds, or who had gotten on their feet and become independently functional only after detoxing from them. So I must at least partially contradict you when you say
quote:
Discarding medication and giving only therapies, as Pjen suggests, would likely also lead to people unable to cope on their own or escape the control of doctors.
infosar as discarding all psychiatric treatments and relying solely on user-run self-help groups or even nothing at all did wonders for many of us.
Original SDMB thread - Schizophrenia
See my previous post on this same thread