A new way of thinking in the psychiatric
health care
 At
the same time as the negativity among the general public at this
time was big, Håkan still means that it was a favorable situation
for changing things. “Democratic labor strategies were advancing,”
he explains. “At the Karolinska Hospital alone we were a rather
large group of young, enthusiastic people who considered it wrong
the way in which the patients were locked up and how the treatment
was forced upon them. The distance between the nursing staff and
the patients was big, something that was characteristic for healthcare
and its routines in general.”
Håkan
and his colleagues’ opinions and urge to make changes in psychiatric
healthcare soon received attention. He means that in this aspect,
the Karolinska Hospital was different. “We were lucky to be
at the Karolinska Hospital. Many of the large specialized institutions
were admittedly new and located in great facilities, but at the
Karolinska Hospital, on the other hand, the divisions were small
and had plenty of staff on duty.”
Practically,
the idea was to get the patients to feel as they were as much involved
as possible. There was also a wish for the use of medications to
be voluntary. The antipsychotic medications, which at this time
were called neuroleptics, at this time still caused serious side
effects, often even with acute reactions. Certain patients that
had been treated for chronic schizophrenia had serious complications,
like for instance tardive dyskinesia (involuntary, small extra movements
that are mixed with the normal movement pattern and make the movements
clumsy and imprecise). At the Karolinska Hospital the high doses
of the neuroleptics were therefore soon questioned. One also realized
that more needed to be found out regarding when and how the medication
should begin.
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