TRANSCRIPT
Do you believe that someone could recover fully from schizophrenia and live a life without any psychiatric medication? Absolutely.
First of all, there’s two ways you can answer that question. One, I know many people, as you do, who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and indeed descended deep into psychotic breaks, who have recovered and are off their medications. So personal experience tells you that it’s possible and that it can happen.
But second of all, and then this is what we don’t know about and we forget about, if you look at the research literature, there’s that recovery was even sort of common. And I mean off medication recovery was quite common before we ended up with this paradigm of care telling people they had to be on drugs for life and they had no hope of ever recovering.
Do you think young psychiatrists are being told, you know, we followed schizophrenia patients up for thirty years and we found that, believe it or not, we don’t have to be so despairing? A third completely recover. Now they all happen to be off their drugs. So what we should do is help them get up there, right? Is that told to psychiatric residents today? Not a chance.