Back from the Brink: “Psychological treatments for schizophrenia attract renewed
interest… Researchers are increasingly exploring ways to combine
psychological and social approaches with antipsychotic drugs, especially
in the early stages of the disorder. Techniques in the spotlight include
family-education sessions, job training, social rehabilitation, and several
forms of one-on-one psychotherapy.” Schizophrenia is a brain disorder we so far haven’t found a way to ‘cure.” But if we do, I’m convinced that it is not going to be through the ‘talking cure’, as psychotherapy has been called since the days of Freud, since which time clinicians have been valiantly attempting a gamut of therapeutic techniques with patients suffering from schizophrenia. The emphasis on medication treatment is not, as this article implies, because of physicians being bombarded with pharmaceutical company pressures to see things that way to support drug company profits, or because managed medical care discouraged complicated and time-consuming psychotherapeutic approaches. It began decades before the current generation of extremely costly ‘atypical’ antipsychotic medications, when we had dirt-cheap generic antipsychotics off patent protection because they had been around for decades; and it began a medical school generation before managed care was a blip on the horizon. It is simply because schizophrenia is a family of conditions in which basic brain functioning is awry in profound ways which cannot be corrected by reorganizing the personality structure and relatedness with insight, catharsis or the other magics that a therapy relationship works in ‘lesser’ conditions. Nevertheless, the art of creating a nonthreatening, supportive, thoughtful, safe treatment context with someone for whom all human interaction has become bewildering and terrifying had largely been lost somewhere along the way. It’s true that the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater and that psychiatrists-to-be can go through their entire training process without learning how to talk to such patients. If inddeed there’s a resurgence of interest in learning how to talk to the most psychiatrically ill patients, it can only be a good thing. Me? I’d never stopped… Science News