Since you're all really sensitive about copy pasted texts, this is copy pasted. xoxo
Soteria is a community service that provides a space for people experiencing mental distress or crisis.
Soterias were open — they had no restraint facilities for young psychotic patients, mostly at their onset. Loren Mosher, who founded the Soteria experience, showed that treating psychosis also in the acute phase is possible without using restraint methods.
Soteria houses are often seen as gentler alternatives to a psychiatric hospital system perceived as authoritarian, hostile or violent and based on routine use of psychiatric (particularly antipsychotic) drugs.
Former patients declared that they needed “love and food and understanding, not drugsâ€, and the Soteria Project was meant to compare results of the methods
Functioning of most psychiatric wards is principally based on the medical model. Doctors possess decision-making powers and final authority; primary therapeutic value is attached to drugs used extensively; patients are considered as having an illness, with concomitant disability and dysfunction which should be “treated†and “curedâ€; labeling and its consequences, namely stigmatization and objectification, are almost inevitable.At Soteria, in contrast, the primary focus was on development, learning, and growth.
Soteria or Soteria-based houses are currently run in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland,Hungary and some other countries.
Research at Soteria Berne found that most acute schizophrenia patients can be as successfully treated as by standard hospital proceedings, but with significantly lower doses of anti-psychotics and without higher daily costs. In addition, the Soteria approach appeared to offer certain advantages mainly located at the subjective-emotional, familial and social level.
In the context of increasing interest in the Soteria approach in the United Kingdom, several European countries, North America, and Australasia, a review of controlled trials suggested the Soteria paradigm yields equal, and in certain specific areas better, results in the treatment of people diagnosed with first- or second-episode schizophrenia spectrum disorders (and with considerably lower use of medication) when compared with conventional, medication-based approaches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteria_(psychiatric_treatment)
Conventional psychiatry tends to regard 'psychosis' as part of a serious mental illness such as 'schizophrenia', 'bi-polar disorder' or 'psychotic depression'. We recognise that 'psychosis' can be extremely distressing to the person experiencing it and to those around them. However, we do not necessarily see psychosis as a bio-medical condition that requires set medical interventions. Rather, we see it as an acute personal crisis, marked by a range of extra-ordinary experiences, which may result from a number of factors, including trauma, psychological, neurophysiological, existential, spiritual, social and environmental. Fundamentally though, we believe that there is meaning in the experience.
http://www.soterianetwork.org.uk
Basically, the Soteria method can be characterized as the 24 hour a day application of interpersonal phenomenologic interventions by a nonprofessional staff, usually without neuroleptic drug treatment, in the context of a small, homelike, quiet, supportive, protective, and tolerant social environment. The core practice of interpersonal phenomenology focuses on the development of a nonintrusive, noncontrolling but actively empathetic relationship with the psychotic person without having to do anything explicitly therapeutic or controlling. In shorthand, it can be characterized as “being with,†“standing by attentively,†“trying to put your feet into the other person’s shoes,†or “being an LSD trip guide†(remember, this was the early 1970s in California). The aim is to develop, over time, a shared experience of the meaningfulness of the client’s individual social context-current and historical. Note, there were no therapeutic “sessions†at Soteria. However, a great deal of “therapy†took place there as staff worked gently to build bridges, over time, between individuals’ emotionally disorganized states to the life events that seemed to have precipitated their psychological disintegration. The context within the house was one of positive expectations that reorganization and reintegration would occur as a result of these seemingly minimalist interventions.
https://beyondmeds.com/2011/02/22/soteria-2/
Read more at: http://www.moshersoteria.com/articles/soteria-and-other-alternatives-to-acute-psychiatric-hospitalization/
And google it :D I knooooooow the sources is a bit meh. But it's informative enough as a start-point. Use for example scholar.google.se for better sources :)
Be safe, take care and know there is hope <3
Love you,
Sincerely Missy