Below is the first white paper drafted by Ronald Bassman for Survivors and Families Empowered (SAFE).
First White Paper
Today, there is a heightened awareness of the influence of family, friends, and community upon a person’s recovery from diagnoses that were erroneously believed to be a life-long sentence.
Historically, families have been implicitly or explicitly blamed for the mental illness of their relative. Before World War II, in the United States, families were routinely advised to abandon their mentally ill member to the asylum, to give up hope, to cut off all ties and to mourn their loss. Since then, dominant beliefs and practices in the mental health system have bounced between the extremes of either blaming families or exonerating them (by blaming genetics and/or chemical imbalances in the brain). Family members have been pushed and pulled, blamed by professionals, or let off the hook, but rarely, if ever, offered services that addressed the complexity and uniqueness of the individual, nor were they effective in maximizing a specific individual’s chances for personal growth and recovery.
Survivors And Families Empowered (S.A.F.E) is a group comprised of people who identify their experiences seeking help from health professionals as unsatisfactory. We have come together to deconstruct the accepted myths that we have learned to be barriers in one’s recovery journey. The lack of genuine guidance that is available to a distressed family member and the families themselves severely limits positive outcomes. Too often when we have sought help, we have lost our right to choose, along with our personal agency. As a result a once valued distressed family member begins down a path into becoming a chronic mental patient.
At SAFE, we believe that there are many caring families who could learn how to provide needed support and join with other families to address the causes that have led to the distress and find more productive ways of dealing with disturbing thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
The program we propose at SAFE has three parts: Education, Support, and the Healing power of genuine HOPE.
Our Plan
Personal experiences of core group family members and psychiatric survivors write articles sharing their experience on Mad in America and other venues to disseminate the SAFE project and encourage participation.
Identify and share the experiences of family members and psychiatric survivors: what they believe was helpful, what was harmful, and what they needed and sought but was not available. For evaluation purposes, the information gathering will be in-person and virtual.
Development of curriculum to educate 5-8 couples to learn facilitation skills for setting up Self-help Family Support groups in their respective communities.
- Education: Support groups will demystify the myths about diagnoses and treatments.
- Benefits and dangers of psychiatric drugs
- Risks of involving police interventions during temporary crises
- Alternative support methods
- Support groups will teach ways of maintaining their loved one (Identified patient) at home in the community.
- If families are to keep their relatives out of potentially harmful psychiatric interventions, they are going to need guidance about how to manage their own distress
- SAFE will evaluate and measure longitudinal outcomes at selected intervals and at the end of the 1st year
- A person from SAFE’s core group will be available through a dedicated phone # to answer questions and provide support for facilitators. At monthly intervals, facilitators and SAFE group will meet to discuss progress
- Understanding the importance of genuine informed consent
- Finding and sharing resources
- Based on results, curriculum will be revised after the 1st year and education and training will be available to new facilitators.
SAFE has constructed this project with the belief that a large number of caring, loving families are best able to decrease the number of people who are damaged, rather than helped by being too quickly forced into treatment to the detriment of their growth and development. Many have come to see themselves as having a life-long serious mental illness. We whose lived experience has shown us that we can positively transform our experience and give up our designation of having a life-long mental illness.
Our ideas for educating families include learning how to communicate with loved ones when they are experiencing depressive thoughts, feelings of hopelessness, hearing voices or experiencing unusual beliefs. We believe that families will benefit from learning about the power of hope, and radical acceptance. Being able to establish workable boundaries and tempering the need to fix a loved one while learning to validate their own feelings and not neglecting self-care will enhance recovery possibilities for the entire family. SAFE Family self-help support groups will also help prepare families on what may be helpful when integrating a loved one back into the family after being discharged from a residential stay in a psychiatric institution.
Sharing stories for the purposes of connecting and healing, learning from people who have recovered from psychiatric labelling and extreme emotional states, deepening our understanding of the continuum of mental health and distress, harnessing the power of hope, using a strengths-based approach, learning ways to stay empathic when relating to one in a extreme state, how to set healthy personal boundaries, and celebrating recovery stories can transform the very human experience of madness.