The Truth About Schizophrenia Part Two
In part two of this series I will discus the Social Model.
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The Social Model
In the 1800’s before psychoanalyses and psycho pharmacology, 70% of patients in hospitals were discharged after their first admission receiving ‘moral treatment’. They had either improved or recovered from their symptoms. (Alexander and Selesnick 1966; Bockoven 1972)
By 1900 after ‘moral treatment’ was abandoned and replaced with more scientific somatic treatment, discharge rates dropped to 20-30%.
Moral treatment included:
- Striving to understand the patient as an individual
- Developing a full and accurate history
- Encouraging work and socializing
- Never humiliating patients
- Only use physical force to prevent a patient from harming themselves or others, never as punishment.
The figures speak for themselves and yet there are many people in the medical profession who do their best to convince the public of the contrary. Some of them claim that, insight-orientated psychotherapy should be avoided. In an article in the ’New England Journal of Medicine’, 1981, Dr. T.C. Manschreck claimed; ’ To offer traditional psychotherapy as the only treatment for Schizophrenic disorders is generally regarded as inadequate and possible recklessness.’ Sadly enough the battle between psychiatrist and psychologists has resulted in many innocent casualties among mental patients/clients, who have the right to information, so that they can choose their treatment.
Carl Jung worked together with Bleuler, who was surprised that applying Freud’s idea’s when treating patients with schizophrenia at the Burgholzl clinic the discharges tripled. (Federn 1943 a,b)
Federn warned against adverse environmental influences, such as increased repression, premature uncovering of unconscious issues and negative transference
Premature uncovering of the unconscious is always dangerous. Psychotherapy is a marathon not a race.
Although Freud had set out to get to know his patients, listen, empathise and be congruent with them, he later came under great pressure of his peers, who began to reject him as a colleague. The general belief in this time was that the symptoms of a mental illness were caused by the patients themselves. The patients were making up stories and in their sub consciousness there was something that forced them to behave in a certain way. The leap to change this belief and putting the blame on the stressful events in the patients life was to big for Freud.
We know now that when people do experience traumatic or stressful episodes and when they repress these memories and connected feelings, this is stored in the brain. Whether they like it or not, one day these repressed episodes will manifest themselves one way or the other. Some people get nightmares, psychosomatic pains, depressed, etc. When they don’t seek help, these symptoms eat away the person’s insides. Like a cancer. Some people literally do get cancer and this will leave the body the minute a person dies, it comes out of every opening in the body. Black.
Freud became stuck between the Medical Model and the Social Model. Although he did emphasize the role of the subconscious and trauma as the main causes of mental illness, he could not find the courage to face his own personal issues.
Kleinian analysts see the phenomenology of Schizophrenia as a defence against overwhelming abolition and tormenting anxieties. They interpret unconscious matters at the level of greatest anxiety, to develop awareness of the links between reality and fantasy.
you can read part one here www.healthmad.com/mental-health/the-truth-about-schizophrenia-part-one/
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