Schizophrenia: A drop of sunshine

Reposting this lovely documentary from last year.

This is a beautiful film that documents an inspiring healing path:

from youtube:

It may be one word, but it immediately conjures up multiple connotations – mad, incurable, violent, suicidal, chemical imbalances, crazy, a lifelong condition, an inevitable dependency on Medicines. This film questions this negative mainstream view of the condition, and wonders if an alternative destiny for a person with a diagnosis is possible. It charts out the story of Reshma Valliappan, who now lives a fulfilling life, free of medicines. The film explores a controversial, but ultimately empowering, view of the condition, which a small minority of brave psychologists and psychiatrists are beginning to embrace across the world. It also proposes a contrarian approach towards treatment for the condition, where the patient is encouraged and equipped to become an equal partner in the process of healing.

Part 1

The entire film is below and after the videos there is additional commentary.

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I’d like to respond to one of the statements in the first segment. It states that there has been no cure found for that which gets labeled schizophrenia. This may be in some sense true that no one solution has been shown to always bring someone with the label of schizophrenia back to a place of thriving, but many people have, indeed, come out of what gets labeled the psychotic confusion to clarity and to live a life with a sense of wholeness again and have done that without needing psychiatric drugs for the rest of their lives if at all. We find that people who are expected to recover are much more likely to recover. Hence, it’s less likely that those people who are diagnosed in our western system of psychiatric care which damns people with such diagnosis to a life of illness both in what they are told when they find themselves out of touch with consensual reality as well as the pharmacological treatment which impairs the brain and can impede healing in many cases.

Beyond Meds has published the stories of many who have recovered and gone on to thrive after a diagnosis of schizophrenia or other psychotic phenomena. See here: Psychosis recovery

Basically people find health and well-being through many different means and generally a combination of them. Everything matters.

A few other posts on the subject of psychosis recovery that flies in the face of mainstream psychiatry:

● Madness as a reckoning of one’s own psyche. Yes.

● “Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis”

● “People recover from psychotic disorders all the time, all over the world.” Our mental health system’s denial of this costs lives

● How to empty psych beds everywhere (program in Finland with recovery rates close to 90%)

● Soteria house and similar programs heal people with “schizophrenia” and other severe forms of what is generally called mental illness