Huffington Post, October 6, 2010

by Bruce E. Levine

“Webster’s Dictionary” defines bigot as “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.” Despite the success of alternative mental health treatments for many people, there still exists bigotry against these approaches.

For many self-defined “ex-mental health patients,” “mental health treatment consumers,” and “psychiatric survivors” who attended Alternatives 2010 Conference (September 29 through October 3 in Anaheim, California), D.J. Jaffe’s September 30, 2010 The Huffington Post piece, “People with Mental Illness Shunned by Alternatives 2010 Conference in Anaheim” was insulting. Mr. Jaffe writes of the Alternatives 2010 Conference:

By failing to include ‘people with mental illness’ in the list of ‘consumers’ and ‘survivors’ who are invited, they are sending a not-so-subtle message: mentally ill not welcome.

Mr. Jaffe’s statement can most politely be described as disingenuous. Mr. Jaffe knows full well that the Alternatives Conferences are attended by many people who have been in fact diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and other serious mental illnesses, but who have found that neither their diagnoses nor their standard treatments have been helpful. In other words, not only does the Alternative Conference welcome people who have been labeled as mentally ill, the conference celebrates them, and provides them an arena and a platform.

Why is there a need for alternatives to standard drug treatments? A long-term outcome study of schizophrenic patients who were treated with and without psychiatric drugs was published in 2007 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, research psychologist Martin Harrow, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, discovered that after 4.5 years, 39 percent of the non-medicated group were “in recovery” and 60 percent had jobs. In contrast, during that same time period, the condition of the medicated patients worsened, with only six percent in recovery and few holding jobs. At the fifteen-year follow-up, among the non-drug group, only 28 percent suffered from any psychotic symptoms; in contrast, among the medicated group, 64 were actively psychotic.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-e-levine/confronting-bigots-intole_b_749836.html

For more information on the success of treating patients diagnosed “schizophrenic” without the use of psychiatric drugs,  read about the work of psychiatrist Loren Mosher, former Chief of Schizophrenic Research for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and founder of Soteria House http://www.moshersoteria.com/about.htm