[Soteria House. Environment or new therapy ? A personal experience.].
Soteria House is an alternative treatment resource offering an approach very different from that of the hospital milieu. The staff is non-professional and the residents are treated without neuroleptics. They are permitted to experience their "fragmentation" and their "psychotic break" while providing them with what they say they need, and with as little as possible interference with the expression of these needs. Our personal experience, as a member of staff, and of life with the residents of Soteria House, gave us the opportunity to inspect this approach and to confront the currently espoused belief about psychotics which hold that they are irresponsible and incomprehensible, and require a closed, highly professionalized treatment milieu, and the use of neuroleptics. Soteria House challenges the traditional treatment forms, just as much as the treatment provides themselves and their tools. The Soteria approach does not represent a miracle treatment, but rather a new way of considering the occurrence of rupture, that is to say " a potential experience of positive and constructive growth which allows the person to better face the demands of life" (L. Mosher). It is therefore necessary that this experience (psychotic) not be prematurely aborted by psycho-biological or chemical intrusion which act to straitjacket this evolution.
Pinero
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