TRANSCRIPT
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In Northern Finland, a stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle, there exists a program that is getting an 85% recovery rate—a far majority off medication for people experiencing first break psychosis. It’s something that happens between people. It’s how we work.
Yeah, we aim at the democratic system where people can have their say about their own treatment. We have the idea of hearing people and creating something together based on that. Who are they? How do they work? What are their principles? And why are they, in this era of rampant psychiatric medications and long-term disability, so successful?
All of us could have psychotic problems. It’s an answer to a very difficult life situation. Psychotic meaning making is meaning making, and I want to have dialogue around meaning making. I don’t think we should medicate psychotic meaning making. It’s, in a way, a kind of metaphorical way to speak of things that you beforehand did not have any words to speak about.
There’s some kind of dilemma in your life and in your emotional life, and when you start to work with that dilemma, the symptoms can go away as well. This is the Land of Open Dialogue, where for more than 20 years they’ve been documenting their results, which are the best in the western world for psychosis, to the degree that schizophrenia is now disappearing from their region. They’re down to two cases per 100,000—a 90% decline in schizophrenia there.
And why? Because their first episode cases aren’t becoming chronic. There’s an assumption, of course, that once someone has schizophrenia, they always have schizophrenia, and you don’t see it that way.
No, I think it is only the name for something, and you can get quite healthy afterwards without medication. Without medication, basically, the world has a chance to sort of break out of this mindset, its hand, the world psychiatry system, and do something better.
And so you’re talking about the capacity, the opportunity to tell a story that literally could alter millions of lives if societies would change and learn from the Western Lapland success.
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