Drug-free in Norway?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can Norwegians with psychosis benefit from radical, drug-free treatment? In a challenge to the foundations of western psychiatry, a handful of Norway’s mental health facilities are offering medication-free treatment to people with serious psychiatric conditions. But five years after the scheme began it is still being questioned by the health establishment. For Assignment, Lucy Proctor hears the testimony of Norwegian psychiatric patients, and the doctors who have aligned themselves on either side of the debate. Why is this happening in Norway? And how much power should people with debilitating psychosis have over their own lives?

Presenter: Lucy Proctor Producer: Linda Pressly

(Image: Artwork depicting a young woman, with her head in her hands. Credit: Malin Rossi)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a signment from Norway. It's about mental health and a warning. Some
0:08.6	listeners might find these stories disturbing. I kind of struggled since I was quite young. Depression, I had very low of self-esteem and after a while I started hearing this voice inside my head that kept telling me that I was
0:27.7	worthless and I was fat and I should kill myself and how I should kill myself.
0:34.0	He became very angry.
0:37.0	He kind of isolated me a bit, I think, because he got a lot of power.
0:42.0	Eventually, I also... he got a lot of power.
0:50.0	Eventually I also started sometimes seeing things like tentacles coming out of the walls.
0:57.0	Marlin, she's 34 from a small town in the far north of Norway. I have this kind of nightmare world that's been with me all my life I think.
1:05.0	Marlin has spent years on antipsychotic medication
1:11.0	to try and keep this nightmare world at bay.
1:14.0	It hasn't worked.
1:16.0	So she's just returned to a small ward in a psychiatric hospital
1:22.0	hundreds of miles from home to try a radical
1:25.3	approach for people with serious mental health conditions. Treatment without drugs.
1:30.3	I'm Niecie Proctor and this edition of assignment on the BBC World Service
1:36.7	begins at a hospital in Trumpsa, the gateway to the Arctic and home to one of
1:42.2	Norway's new medication-free units.
1:47.0	Marlin was 21 when her life began to unravel.
1:50.7	Kind of had a total breakdown. I got committed to a unit. By the end of it I was I was so
1:59.1	full of drugs my mind was just a blur I just sat there passively watching my life go by.
2:06.0	For a whole year, it's going to have been the same thing over and over. I've seeked help and what they can give me is medication.
2:19.0	And I cannot be content with this life. I need some meaning. I want to contribute.
	...

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