Healing Homes: An Alternative, Swedish Model For Healing Psychosis

[Makrosky]

Healing Homes, a feature-length documentary film directed by Daniel Mackler, chronicles the work of the Family Care Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden -- a program which, in this era of multi-drug cocktails and psychiatric diagnoses-for-life, helps people recover from psychosis without medication.

The organization, backed by over twenty years of experience, places people who have been failed by traditional psychiatry in host families -- predominately farm families in the Swedish countryside -- as a start for a whole new life journey.

Host families are chosen not for any psychiatric expertise, rather, for their compassion, stability, and desire to give back. People live with these families for upwards of a year or two and become an integral part of a functioning family system. Staff members offer clients intensive psychotherapy and provide host families with intensive supervision.

The Family Care Foundation eschews the use of diagnosis, works within a framework of striving to help people come safely off psychiatric medication, and provides their services, which operate within the context of Swedish socialized medicine, for free.

Healing Homes weaves together interviews with clients, farm families, and staff members to create both a powerful vision of medication-free recovery and an eye-opening critique of the medical model of psychiatry.

When they say without medication, you have to understand that it is without BigPharma drugs NOR hormones, vitamins, coconut oil or 2 gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice from the tropic a day.

The process can be slow, until the patient establishes an empathic bond of trust with the family and the recovery starts. The key of recovery lies in the integration with the family, the daily living, to relate to each other like "normal" human beings that talk, cry, laugh, get angry...human beings that express with freedom. The drug treatment abandoned very slowly, diminishing the doses very slowly. At the end of the process, the patient recovers completely and if he/she would have to be evaluated again by a psychiatrist it would be impossible to keep the original diagnosis because the mental disease symptoms have disappeared. (I translated this from a foreing language)

Some comments from them :

“Recovery it’s not about medication but with people...about giving love to people. If you don’t have love, you can’t help - A woman guest in a family

“¿What did you do to help? We just behaved like humans with them... - A man in a host family

With special dedication to @sladerunner69 @pboy @rw39 and @HealthisWealth

 

[HealthisWealth]

I havent watch it but base on your description this is really cool and one of a kind. I hope we have this kind of therapy.

 

[Makrosky]

I havent watch it but base on your description this is really cool and one of a kind. I hope we have this kind of therapy.

May your wishes come true :
http://developingopendialogue.com/?page_id=10

 

[Blossom]

The key of recovery lies in the integration with the family, the daily living, to relate to each other like "normal" human beings that talk, cry, laugh, get angry...human beings that express with freedom.

That's a beautiful video. We need so much more of this all over the world.