Professor Emeritus Yrjö Alanen, an Honorary Lifetime Member of our International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (www.isps.org), passed away on the 26th of December 2022.
Yrjö was involved in ISPS for many years. Way back In 1971, he organized the fourth ISPS international symposium. This was held in the old Finnish capital of Turku in south-west Finland. From then on, he served as a member of the international executive committee of the ISPS until 1997.
Alanen´s 1958 dissertation on “Mothers of Schizophrenic Patients” received international interest. This led him, in 1959, to continue his research at Yale university in the USA, in collaboration with, amongst others, Theodore Lidz. He worked on developing psychotherapy for psychoses from early on in his clinical years. Yrjö finished his psychoanalytic training in 1966. From 1968 to 1990 he was the Professor of Psychiatry at Turku University and was the director of Turku University Clinic of Psychiatry.
During his early years at Turku University he started the internationally famous Turku Schizophrenia Project. The main aim was to develop and study the care of those patients within the schizophrenia group of psychoses who were in the public mental health sector. This systematic work led to the development of the well-known Need Adapted Treatment approach.
The term”need-adapted treatment of the schizophrenia group of psychoses” refers to integration of psychotherapeutically oriented treatments into a continuous process, broadly based on the changing needs of the patient, as well as those of the patient’s social network.
In addition to research and developmental work, Yrjö also contributed to the development of other projects. For example, The psychosis ward where therapeutic work would take place following the democratic principles of therapeutic communities where hierarchical structures were minimized. All levels of staff were able to participate in long term community psychotherapeutic and psychotherapeutically oriented work under supervision, even if needed for several years. Yrjö’s deep knowledge and wide contacts made it possible to invite internationally established psychosis psychotherapists to come quite regularly to lecture at the clinic.
Yrjö was always interested in families, family therapy and family work. In the early years it was seen as a support for individual therapy. At the same time family therapy, family therapy training and other family-centered activities were actively developed in Turku. In 1979, while Yrjö was chairing the Finnish Mental Health Association, the association started a national family therapy training program. This introduced systemic ideas and they were incorporated in the Need Adapted Approach. It started to develop in the directions that still prevail.
Yrjö was influential in promoting national mental health policies. He led several national committees and the Need Adapted Approach was spread around the country during the National Schizophrenia Project 1981-1987. Especially important were multi-professional psychosis teams and therapy meetings, where staff members regularly met the patient, his or her relatives and others close to the patient. In the beginning of the 1990s, there were 50 psychosis teams in different parts of Finland. Unfortunately, this development vanished with our severe financial depression and with organizational changes within health care.
During the years that followed Alanen’s activity, Finnish psychiatry has faced severe financial cuts and a return to a more traditional orientation, in keeping with the international trend of treatment centred on medication and diagnosis. The Need Adapted Approach, however, survives in several centers.
Alanen’s academic dissertation ’The mothers of schizophrenic patients’ (1958) was, and still is, a classic in the history of schizophrenia studies. It is a study of the personalities, and mother-child relationships, of 100 mothers, and their significance in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Another classic study is “The family in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and neurotic disorders” (1966). His magnum opus is his book “Schizophrenia, Its Origins and Need-adapted Treatment”, (1997), Karnac Books. It has been translated into several languages and has had several reprints.
Yrjö and his team published very many scientific papers in national and international journals. The first volume of this journal, in 2009, included his article “Towards a more humanistic psychiatry”. A glimpse of Yrjö’s extensive knowledge in the field can also be found in the book “Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenic Psychoses” (2009) - published in the ISPS book series.
For more information about Professor Alanen:
http://isps.org/index.php/isps-membership/isps-honorary-members/item/39-yrj%C3%B6-alanen