Healing Homes: An Alternative, Swedish Model for Healing Psychosis

By Daniel Mackler


Healing Homes, a feature-length documentary film directed by Daniel Mackler, chronicles the work of the Family Care Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden -- a program which, in this era of multi-drug cocktails and psychiatric diagnoses-for-life, helps people recover from psychosis without medication.

The organization, backed by over twenty years of experience, places people who have been failed by traditional psychiatry in host families -- predominately farm families in the Swedish countryside -- as a start for a whole new life journey.

Host families are chosen not for any psychiatric expertise, rather, for their compassion, stability, and desire to give back.  People live with these families for upwards of a year or two and become an integral part of a functioning family system.  Staff members offer clients intensive psychotherapy and provide host families with intensive supervision.

The Family Care Foundation eschews the use of diagnosis, works within a framework of striving to help people come safely off psychiatric medication, and provides their services, which operate within the context of Swedish socialized medicine, for free.

Healing Homes weaves together interviews with clients, farm families, and staff members to create both a powerful vision of medication-free recovery and an eye-opening critique of the medical model of psychiatry.

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Bonus features:  In addition to the 79-minute film, the DVD contains an in-depth interview with the director, Daniel Mackler.

Click to view the Healing Homes trailer on YouTube

If you want to think of alternatives to biological psychiatry and its treatments for mental disorders, watch Healing Homes and ask yourself: Which way is better? The words of a young mother, finding refuge on a farm in Sweden, will stay with you: "If you do not have love, you cannot help." Healing Homes is a moving, thoughtful, and inspiring film.
    -Robert Whitaker
     author, Anatomy of an Epidemic and Mad in America
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Take These Broken Wings

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Take These Broken Wings is a feature-length documentary film showing that people can recover fully from schizophrenia without psychiatric medication. The film features the untold story of bestselling author Joanne Greenberg, whose fictionalized memoir of her recovery from schizophrenia, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, rocked the mental health world.

The film also features Catherine Penney, whose gripping tale of unmedicated recovery was chronicled by her therapist, Daniel Dorman, MD, in the book Dante’s Cure: A Journey Out of Madness.

Their accounts are interwoven with interviews of internationally renowned giants in the field of schizophrenia recovery. These include Peter Breggin, MD (author of Toxic Psychiatry), Robert Whitaker (journalist, author of Mad in America), and Bertram Karon, PhD (author of Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia: Treatment of Choice).

The result is not just an arc of a healing story, but a challenge to the current model of schizophrenia treatment – that schizophrenia is a lifelong, incurable “brain disorder” treatable only with anti-psychotic drugs.

Enjoy these brief clips from this remarkable documentary:

DVD - Running Time: 75 Minutes