Soteria (psychiatric treatment)

[1] Based on a recovery model, the common elements of the Soteria approach include the use of primarily nonmedical staff, who do not prescribe or administer antipsychotic medication to patients, and the preservation of residents' personal power, social networks, and communal responsibilities.

[7]: 113 Soteria emerged as a response to former psychiatric patients who said that they needed "love and food and understanding, not drugs",[8] by providing an alternative centered on development, learning, and growth,[7]: 113  and by comparing its results to those of the traditional model.

Mosher was influenced by the philosophy of moral treatment, previous experimental therapeutic communities (such as the Fairweather Lodges), the work of Harry Stack Sullivan,[9] and Freudian psychoanalysis.

[6] The US Soteria Project closed as a clinical program in 1983 due to lack of financial support, although it became the subject of research evaluation with competing claims and analysis.

Writing in 1999, Mosher described the core of Soteria as "the 24 hour a day application of interpersonal phenomenologic interventions by a nonprofessional staff, usually without neuroleptic drug treatment, in the context of a small, homelike, quiet, supportive, protective, and tolerant social environment.

However, the Bern approach differs from Mosher's original project in that it does not adopt the same anti-medical stance, using a consensual low-dose anti-psychotic treatment and including psychiatric staff.

[1] In the context of increasing interest in the Soteria model in the United Kingdom, several European countries, North America, and Australasia, a review of controlled trials was conducted in order to evaluate the efficacy of the approach in the treatment of people diagnosed with schizophrenia.