Soteria (psychiatric treatment)

Soteria is a community service that provides a space for people experiencing mental distress or crisis. Based on a recovery model, common elements of the Soteria approach include primarily non-medical staffing; preserving resident's personal power, social networks, and communal responsibilities; finding meaning in the subjective experience of psychosis by "being with" clients; and no or minimal use of antipsychotic medication (with any medication taken from a position of choice and without coercion).

Soterias were open—they had no restraint facilities for young psychotic patients, mostly at their onset. Loren Mosher, who founded the Soteria experience, showed that treating psychosis also in the acute phase is possible without using restraint methods.

Soteria houses are often seen as gentler alternatives to a psychiatric hospital system perceived as authoritarian, hostile or violent and based on routine use of psychiatric (particularly antipsychotic) drugs. Soteria houses are sometimes used as "early intervention" or "crisis resolution" services.

Former patients declared that they needed "love and food and understanding, not drugs", and the Soteria Project was meant to compare results of the methods. Functioning of most psychiatric wards is principally based on the medical model. Doctors possess decision-making powers and final authority; primary therapeutic value is attached to drugs used extensively; patients are considered as having an illness, with concomitant disability and dysfunction which should be "treated" and "cured"; labeling and its consequences, namely stigmatization and objectification, are almost inevitable. At Soteria, in contrast, the primary focus was on development, learning, and growth.

The original Soteria Research Project was founded by psychiatrist Loren Mosher in San Jose, California in 1971. A replication facility ("Emanon") opened in 1974 in another suburban San Francisco Bay Area city. Loren Mosher was influenced by the philosophy of moral treatment, previous experimental therapeutic communities (such as the Fairweather Lodges), the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, and Freudian psychoanalysis. The name Soteria comes from the Greek Σωτηρία for "salvation" or "deliverance" (see Soter).

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