Psychiatry “Disappears” Anti-drug Advocate, Loren Mosher

     American Psychiatrist Loren Mosher followed a prestigious route for his training in mental health, receiving degrees from both Stanford and Harvard, and he began working at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1964. He soon developed an interest in alternative treatments for schizophrenia.

     In 1968 he was promoted to the role of Director for the NIMH Center for Schizophrenia Studies. He soon formed the view that the controlling atmosphere of a psychiatric hospital and the over-medication of schizophrenic patients actually hindered their recovery.

     Mosher then started the Soteria Research Project in San Jose, California, in 1971. He selected unmarried patients between the ages of 18 and 30 who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, per the DSM-II label. The staff were trained to treat the residents as equals in a calm, non-institutional environment and the residents participated equally with staff in running the house. Medication was kept to a minimum.

     At the end of the first two years , 42 percent of the residents had never been exposed to antipsychotics. 39 percent had used medication for a shorter period of time. Only 19 percent had taken them continually. The Soteria patients had lower psychopathology scores, had fewer hospital readmissions, and had better global adjustment compared to conventionally institutionalized patients treated with antipsychotic medication.

     The San Jose Soteria project ran for ten years until 1983, when its funding was denied by an increasingly Big Pharma controlled psychiatric community.

     In 1980 Loren Mosher himself was fired from his position as head of the Schizophrenia Center at the NIMH. Big Pharma’s psychiatric establishment could no longer tolerate his views on what constituted successful treatment for schizophrenia. In 1988 he resigned publicly from the American Psychiatric Association by writing that his true belief was that he was “actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association. Luckily, the organization’s true identity requires no change in the acronym.”

     Today in America, psychiatry remains under Big Pharma’s stranglehold philosophy of overmedication and controlled institutionalization.

     Overseas, successful Soteria-based treatment facilities still operate today in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary. There is only one Soteria-based treatment facility in America, in South Burlington, Vermont.

     Mosher held various teaching positions after being ostracized by the officialdom of psychiatry, and he worked closely until his death in 2024 with patient advocacy groups such as Mind Freedom International to protect the rights of people who have been labeled with psychiatric disorders .