🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
When it comes to adopting the recovery model, the 2020s feel like they’re already slipping away. They aren’t, of course, but they’re the decade to finally fulfill a promise psychiatry actually has the ability to keep.
We know the biomedical model doesn’t work. Biopsychiatrists spent billions trying to show the supposed biogenic origins of mental illness. In doing so, psychiatry failed to care for patients by establishing better (some would say humane) treatments and systems based on rehabilitation and (yes) recovery. As Thomas Insel put it in his book Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health,
“I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”
This has led some to fault Insel, but I admire him for talking about this publicly and trying to rectify the situation in his current work in biotech. How many professionals—particularly doctors, researchers, and other clinicians—admit when they’re wrong?
For three centuries, we’ve been recovering—if we’re in the right conditions with physicians who believe we can. In The Roots of the Recovery Movement in Psychiatry: Lessons Learned, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale Medical College and champion of recovery Larry Davidson and his colleagues write about the wisdom of Philippe Pinel, a physician, and Jean-Baptiste Pussin, governor of the hospital Bicître in Paris, in the eighteenth-century. Pinel and Pussin argued the “insane” could recover. (Davidson states that this was the first time the word recovery was used in relation to those with mental illnesses.) The two men developed traîtement moral, a psychiatric practice that asserted that patients, who were viewed by others as demonic or bestial, shouldn’t be chained or abused and should receive psychological care.
This method of treatment was rooted in the belief that patients could not only recover but also recover so completely that they could return to the hospital and be employed to help others in their journeys to wellness—an early example of peer support. (Pussin had once been a patient at the hospital before he became governor, albeit for tuberculosis.)
To read or listen to the complete Cured, choose the discounted annual subscription for $30—about the price of a hardcover book. Each purchase brings awareness to mental health recovery.
You can also gift ‘Cured’ to someone in need.