Healing Homes is a feature-length documentary film, directed by Daniel Mackler, which chronicles the work of the Family Care Foundation (Gothenburg, Sweden) who, in this era of multi-drug cocktails and psychiatric diagnoses-for-life, run programmes to help people recover from psychosis without medication.
The organisation, 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 (who only take clients from inside Sweden) 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 socialised medicine, for free.
The films director, says that:
“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.”
You can watch a trailer here:
And you can watch the entire film here:
And if you want to buy a DVD copy of the film, then you can do so from here.
