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http://www.prozacspotlight.org/worldnews/index.html
Loren Mosher, pioneer in community mental health, dead at 70
"So, do I want to be a drug company patsy? No, thank you very much." Loren
Mosher, the psychiatrist and pioneer in community mental health who wrote
these words after resigning from the American Psychiatric Association in
1998, died earlier this month. He was an important influence for us here at
Adbusters, both in the magazine (e.g., MadPride, no. 41) and in the creation
of our website prozacspotlight.org.
After graduating from Harvard medical school in the 1960s, Mosher took a
position at the National Institute of Mental Health. There he studied sets of
identical twins where one developed schizophrenia but the other did not - a
scenario that showed on its face that mental problems go beyond biology and
family abuse. Mosher went on to become Chief of the NIMH's Center for Studies
of Schizophrenia, where for almost two decades he challenged the standard
practice of overwhelming the mentally disturbed with powerful drugs.
From the start, Mosher faced an uphill battle. De-institutionalization in the
1970s put individuals with severe mental difficulties back on the streets,
literally. Society's solution, served up by psychopharmacologists and the
drug industry, was to keep them heavily medicated. An ardent believer that
supportive social environments can do more to treat mental problems such as
schizophrenia than can pills, Mosher resisted the trend, embracing the spirit
of community psychology instead. People of all "kinds" should live together
in equality, not housed in hierarchical psychiatric institutions (as depicted
in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Like all people, these
individuals need homes, not hospitals, Mosher insisted.
With the realization that psychiatric hospitals cultivated insanity rather
than cure it, Mosher opened Soteria House in 1971, putting his beliefs into
practice. There, young "schizophrenics" lived drug-free with a
nonprofessional staff that encouraged mutual respect. Instead of gaining
greater support, however, his studies showing patient recovery without
medication led to the removal of the project's funding and prompted immediate
backlash within psychiatry. This increased after Mosher initiated a second
residential treatment project, ultimately culminating with his dismissal from
the NIMH. "By 1980, I was removed from my [NIMH] post altogether. All of this
occurred because of my strong stand against the overuse of medication and
disregard for drug-free, psychological interventions to treat psychological
disorders."
After 1980, psychiatry became even more subservient to Big Pharma and Mosher
became an even more important voice in decrying psychiatry's confusion over
whom they served, the community or the pharmaceutical industry. His idea of
building residential treatment gained support outside the US, meanwhile, with
sites created across much of western Europe.
A clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San
Diego medical school, Loren R. Mosher, 70, died of liver cancer July 10 at a
treatment center in Berlin. Survivors include his wife of 16 years, Judy
Schreiber, three children from the first marriage, two brothers, and a
granddaughter.
Richard DeGrandpre
Go to this link to the actual ad text from a 1962 ad from sk&b
http://www.prozacspotlight.org/worldnews/1962adtext07_04.html
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