Clinical Practice of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Working under group supervision by a social worker, in the first year of the case aide program, 11 of our 14 patients were released from the hospital, and only 3 returned during follow-ups that lasted 1 or 2 years. These abandoned people were so-called back ward patients, individuals on whom psychiatry and the community had given up. The staff referred 

The volunteer program lasted for many years after I had graduated, until finally, with the domination of biological psychiatry, it withered away. Working in the hospitals in those years just before the so-called miracle drugs became the only treatment, I learned how basic human relationship could revive, and even restore, the lives of the most chronically disturbed patients, even those who had experienced years of abuse in a state mental hospital. 

---