Your daily reinforcement

Do you feel sometimes that you are mostly alone in your belief that your relative does not have a diseased brain? The insightful blogger Alt_mentalities has reminded me once more of Dr. Loren Mosher's important contribution to viewing schizophrenia as a psycho/spiritual breakdown and healing process rather than a real "disease" as mainstream psychiatry would have us believe.

If you aren't already familiar with his work, the two must read articles are

Still Crazy After All These Years - Jeanette De Wyze  interview with Dr. Mosher
San Diego Weekly Reader, Vol. 32, No. 2, Jan. 9, 2003

and

Dr. Mosher's letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association - accusing psychiatry and pharma of getting into bed together. The letter was written in 1998, when psychiatry and pharma were still indulging in foreplay by today's standards!

Some extracts - but the letter is chock full of memorable quotes, so read it in full.

No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts — rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter — whatever its configuration.......

.......In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don’t remember the members being asked if they supported such an association) such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the “champion of their clients” the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring: NAMI with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring.

........“Biologically based brain diseases” are certainly convenient for families and practitioners alike. It is no-fault insurance against personal responsibility. We are all just helplessly caught up in a swirl of brain pathology for which no one, except DNA, is responsible.