Improving Mental Health Outcomes: September, 2023 Report
The mental health system’s standard treatments are colossally counterproductive and harmful, often forced on unwilling patients. The overreliance on psychiatric drugs is reducing the recovery rate of people diagnosed with serious mental illness from a possible 80% to 5% and reducing their life spans by 20 years or so. Psychiatric incarceration, euphemistically called “involuntary commitment,” is similarly counterproductive and harmful, adding to patients’ trauma and massively associated with suicides. Harmful psychiatric interventions are being imposed on people without consideration of the facts about treatments and their harms, and are a violation of International Law.
Improving Mental Health: What Works
The most important elements for improving patients’ lives are People, Place and Purpose. People—even psychiatric patients—need to have relationships (People), a safe place to live (Place), and activity that is meaningful to them, usually school or work (Purpose). People need to be given hope these are possible.
Voluntary Approaches
Voluntary approaches that improve people’s lives should be made broadly available instead of the currently prevailing counterproductive and harmful psychiatric drugs for everyone, forever, regime often forced on people. These approaches include Peer Respites, Soteria Houses, Open Dialogue, Drug-Free Hospitals, Housing First, Employment, Warm Lines, Hearing Voices Network, Non-Police Community Response Teams, and emotional CPR (eCPR). By implementing these approaches, mental health systems can move towards, and even achieve, the 80% possible recovery rate.
Improving Mental Health in Children and Youth
As bad as it is for adults, the psychiatric incarceration and psychiatric drugging of children and youth is even more tragic and should cease. Instead, children and youth should be helped to manage their emotions and become successful, and their parents should be given support and assistance to achieve this.
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Above is the Executive Summary of Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, published September, 2023. Authors: James B. Gottstein, Esq.; Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD; David Cohen, PhD; Chuck Ruby, PhD; Faith Myers. Full report is at:
https://psychrights.org/ReportOnImprovingMentalHealthOutcomes.pdf
IMHU.org has 40+ courses exploring the approaches listed above which are improvements to standard mental health practices.
Our full roster is HERE.