When 75 Tewksbury State Hospital patients gathered outside the hospital for a press conference on February 14, the stories they told evoked images of the nightmarish state institutions of the past, not of a modern public health-care facility. Courtenay Harding, a SAR professor of rehabilitation counseling and director of BU's new Institute for the Study of Human Resilience, says that given the proper care, people suffering from schizophrenia can reclaim their lives. If people are treated as if they aren't going to get better, they lose hope and feel like they have no control in their life. Basically, they're stripped of the things that will help them get better.
People tend to be very sick at the onset, but the symptoms taper off gradually.
For the past 15 years, Harding has been challenging entrenched professional attitudes about schizophrenia. Basically, we want to discover what empowers patients and what happens during recovery. We'll then use that information to build training programs for mental health-care providers. Harding, who previously taught psychiatry at the University of Colorado for 12 years, says that because the prevailing attitude among American psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nurses is that recovery from schizophrenia is rare or impossible, there has been little research on the recovery process. But evidence exists, she says, that rehabilitation programs that teach schizophrenia patients how to manage their own symptoms and medications and teach job skills, social skills, and simple tasks such as balancing a checkbook all raise patients' self-esteem and help reduce symptoms.