Using the information from the WHO studies to consider an alternative treatment (antistigma and changing society are treatments which psychiatry needs to be sorting out but is done by the mental health charities in the UK)

So In the study a few post below (and others) it's show that social
outcomes in schizophrenia are better in some developing countries than
developed world nations like the US and the UK. They also show clinical
outcomes are better. How mad is that? To people who are aware of the
social model of disability it's probably not that surprising. However in
the clinical outcomes bit should be pretty surprising. To those who
assume schizophrenia is a purely biological illness the data from the
WHO studies is a paradox for their paradigm.

To anyone who cares about the human condition and the lives of people
with experiences of life different to the norm then the results from the
WHO IPSS study are totally fucking amazing.

It shows that there are alternative ways to create better outcomes in
mental healthcare than the Western psychiatric model of mental health
treatment and the societies and cultures of developed world nations.

This is usually the bit where I ramble on about the Royal College of
Psychiatry tasting my chocolate salty balls (a reference to South Park's
character Chef in one episode) for their motto "Let wisdom guide"
because it was Mind and Rethink which put together the world's biggest
amtistigma campaign (relative to population size) ever. The RCPsych have
run piddly little campaigns but have made poor efforts to understand or
discover novel treatments based on the data from the WHO studies, data
which has been around for decades.

But I'm trying to be a bit more professional in my writing. Fuck.

So here's my point. One I've made many times before. While the mode of
psychiatry is to use more and more drugs to change individuals so that
they conform to norms, or specifically are drugged into behavioural
annihilation most often using the major tranquiiser (antipsychotics or
the chemical cosh as they are also know) this has made worse the illness
in Western society, the illness which causes the social disability and,
surprisingly, affects clinical outcomes too.,

Sadly this isn't quite what Time to Change are achieving directly when
they focus on labels and fucking about with them. It's not the stigma of
diagnosis specifically. It's the symptoms which cause the social
disability which I guess is partially or wholly through exclusion and
poverty.

I'm well aware of both. I'm an unmedicated loony.

MY symptoms are how I can understand the exclusion and the poverty. For
me the latter has been around debt. Poverty is caused by bad debt.
Poverty is associated with poorer health outcomes. What that means is
people who are in bad debt are very likely to die earlier, have worse
quality lives and be more ill than those who don't experience it.

Anyway, the symptoms which are described in the psychiatric textbooks
cause the social disability and the need for treatment to remove those
behaviours.

The alternative is for people to accept those behaviours, to develop
systems in the social constructs (law, employment, etc) as well as
change the culture itself to undo the damage which the Great Confinement
of madness caused (this is the period where madness was hidden from
society and the asylum system created. This meant that madness
disappeared from view and this made it more 'ill' or abnormal. It also
meant more people could be pathologised as mad. Even though the asylum
system has reduced in many countries with more people living in the
community the method, usually antispychotics (and mood stabilisers and
antidepressants), were aimed at removing the symptons using chemical
behavioural change.

People never came to accept madness. It is hidden from view in
psychiatric wards during a crisis and by chemicals outside the wards. At
least for those who buy into the psychiatric idea that the symptoms of
mental illness should be hidden.

In a sense they should but only in cowardice to the unwritten laws of
norms formalised through the psychiatric system. The root of the
pathologisation of madness was the mainstream didn't understand it nor
want to. They saw no value in schizoiphrenia or bipolar or depression.
They saw extremes of the human condition and outcast them.

There is the illness. There is where it needs to be treated. This isn't
just some random idea. Many people far smarter than I have said it. The
WHO IPSS data adds significant weight to the idea that a culture which
rejects the different (partially) creates the factors of lowered
clinical and social outcomes on 2 year and 5 year follow up.

We need to heal society and the last thing we want to be doing is
exporting the dogma of psychiatry and mental healthcare to developing
world nations which might be saved from that mistake. I think many
psychiatrists if they took the time to think about it might agree that
while there may be a biological and a psychological component there is a
factor which is clearly significant in the WHO studies which is about
the local culture/nation-type. This is something which psychiatry hasn't
had the balls (or ovaries) to sort out.

It is surprising to note that it's the UK mental health charities which
seem to have understood this. In fact one of them has "changing society"
in its mission. How about you chocolate-salty ball sucking fuckers
(psychiatrists) let their wisdom guide because they're leagues ahead in
what's needed in mental healthcare treatment.