Our staff is experienced at providing DUSSP.
Qualities of ideal support networks include shelter and DUSSP: decency, understanding, support, safety, and privacy. DUSSP is the humane thing to do as a foundation of treatment derived from a support network including family, friends and professionals. DUSSP helps patients maintain self respect and morale. It involves having outings and events to look forward to. This draws upon the natural recovery mechanisms of human beings who like to laugh, be happy and feel needed. DUSSP is very important to mental health and general well-being. Some evidence indicates that industrialized modern societies have lower recovery rates than non-industrialized societies, perhaps due the lack of DUSSP in the former.
Ideal Mental Health Treatment requires DUSSP!
The ideal treatment should include food, shelter, orthomolecular treatment and teamwork.
Food needs to be in ready supply to maintain health and well-being. Whole foods unaffected by modern processing have the highest nutrient quality.
Patients with inadequate shelter often have poor treatment results. In the mid-19th century the return to moral treatment included adequate shelter which yielded a vast improvement. Today, in stark contrast we see the streets as the home of a vast number of mentally ill patients. Inadequate shelter is due largely to the greater availability of tranquilizer medication and the public’s demand to do a better job at lower costs. These factors led to deinstitutionalization or the emptying of patients from psychiatric hospitals under the assumption that new tranquilizer medication was a cure and patients would not need to be readmitted. The plan backfired and a revolving door era emerged. The revolving door era describes mental health sufferers, but especially the majority of schizophrenics, who from the 1960’s to the present day have been released from psychiatric hospitals only to be readmitted soon afterward due to symptom relapse. Revolving door patients rarely become well enough to engage normal activities, get along well with society or earn a living. Despite this dismal outcome, endorsers of deinstitutionalization claim that the risks outweigh the benefits. These same people also claim that better treatments need to be discovered, disregarding that orthomolecular treatment has been available for the past half century.
With orthomolecular treatment patients gain the many benefits of treating the all-encompassing causative aspects of their condition. Biochemical-nutrient aspects described in our Top Orthomolecular Syndromes section need to be assessed and treated to achieve optimal mental health.
Teamwork is important to the outcome of orthomolecular treatment. This involves family support and the collective efforts of social workers, counselors, psychologists, general practitioners, psychiatrists, and doctors of naturopathic medicine.
Orthomolecular treatment is not offered as a cure-all replacement for standard treatment. Some patients require psychiatric drug treatment; some do better on orthomolecular treatment and some require a skillful combination of both. Psychiatric drug treatment where needed is integral. We have expanded on appropriate psychiatric intervention in my article on Optimal Dosing; therein we describe safety, medication management, appropriate medication use, medication dependency and the ‘revolving door’ component.