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The current-day mental health system has been shaped around the idea that people who have been given psychiatric labels suffer in a way over which they have no control and that often results in an inability to care for ones self. It is an approach that encourages the idea that professionals need to step in to be the experts and determine someone's human potential. These beliefs have also influenced other aspects of our culture to the point where news, movies, friends and family tend to perpetuate the message that we are chronically sick and need to re-adjust our hopes and dreams. In some instances, people have been told they won't be able to handle living on their own, going to school, working, getting married or having children. Many have been told they need to take medications, even if they leave them numb, and participate in programs that treat them as if they are children. The Virtues of Non-Compliance talks back to all those ideas in the voice of people who have been there, who have been told they can't, and who have gone on to live their lives on their own terms. -
By Amy Long, LPN, Daniel Fisher, MD, PhD
Recovery through Peer Providers is an invaluable tool for health care purchasers, managed care organizations, behavioral health care providers, and mental health consumers. Promote recovery by inspiring hope, improving communication, building peer support, highlighting positive role models and sharing coping strategies. -
By Daniel Mackler
In the far north of Finland, a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle, a group of innovative family therapists converted the area's traditional mental health system, which once boasted some of Europe's poorest outcomes for schizophrenia, into one that now gets the best statistical results in the world for first-break psychosis. They call their approach Open Dialogue. Their principles, though radical in this day and age of multi-drug cocktails and involuntary hospitalizations, are surprisingly simple. They meet clients in crisis immediately and often daily until the crises are resolved. They avoid hospitalization and its consequential stigma, preferring to meet in the homes of those seeking their services. And, perhaps most controversially, they avoid the use of anti-psychotic medication wherever possible. They also work in groups, because they view psychosis as a problem involving relationships. They include in the treatment process the families and social networks of those seeking their help, and their clinicians work in teams, not as isolated, sole practitioners. Additionally, their whole approach values of the voice of everyone in the process, most especially the person directly in crisis. And finally, they provide their services, which operate within the context of Finnish socialized medicine, for free. Open Dialogue weaves together interviews with psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and journalists to create both a powerful vision of medication-free recovery and a hard-hitting critique of traditional psychiatry. -
Director/Producer PJ Moynihan Producer Oryx Cohen Executive Producer Gayle R. Berg, PhD -
By Daniel Mackler
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. -
By National Empowerment Center
Starting Recovery Dialogues in Your Community
This DVD focuses specifically on one form of dialogical practice: Recovery Dialogues. In the DVD, you will witness an actual Recovery Dialogue and learn how you can set up Recovery Dialogues in your community. -
By Daniel Mackler In June of 2012, twenty-three people came together to discuss the subject of coming off psychiatric drugs. We were psychiatric survivors, therapists, mental health consumers, family members, and activists, united by a passion for truth-telling. More than half of us had successfully come off psych drugs, including cocktails of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. What resulted from our three-day gathering was an unforgettable meeting of the minds. This 75-minute documentary (directed by Daniel Mackler) offers a rare glimpse into the world of coming off psych drugs through the eyes of those who have done it. The film presents, among others, Will Hall, author of the world-renowned “Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs,” Oryx Cohen, director at the National Empowerment Center, Laura Delano, blogger at www.madinamerica.com, and Daniel Hazen, noted psychiatric survivor and human rights activist. Although this documentary is not medical advice, it intends to offer something even better: hope. In a world where increasing numbers of people are put on psychiatric drugs every day, where more than 20 percent of Americans already take them, and where so many are told they need to stay on them for life, COMING OFF PSYCH DRUGS offers proof that another way is possible. -
By National Empowerment Center
A Public Health Education Program
This DVD uses a combination of discussion and scenarios taken from real life to illustrate the values and practice of Emotional CPR (eCPR), an exciting and innovative public health education program designed to teach people how to support others through emotional crisis/distress and into recovery.
