What if the path to healing didn’t begin with control, but instead, started with companionship?
In this moving memoir, Eugene Larkin recounts his years at the radical Soteria House project, where staff lived alongside people experiencing psychosis, offering no medication, only presence. From his Midwestern childhood to the jungles of Brazil, and into the quiet revolutions of empathy and madness, Seeking Soteria is a powerful testimony to what’s possible when we choose trust over fear, being over fixing, and humanity over systems.
Seeking Soteria: Being in Process is a candid and compassionate memoir from Eugene Larkin, a former Peace Corps volunteer and one of the original staff members at Soteria House, a groundbreaking project that offered humane, relationship-based alternatives to psychiatric hospitalization.
Through vivid storytelling, Larkin traces his journey from a Catholic working-class upbringing in the Midwest, through disillusionment and self-discovery in Brazil, to the heart of a groundbreaking experiment in healing schizophrenia without medication. What emerges is not just a personal narrative, but a call for trust, presence, and radical empathy in the face of madness.
Part memoir, part social critique, part love letter to those who walk with others through the dark — Seeking Soteria will resonate with mental health professionals, psychiatric survivors, Peace Corps alumni, and readers seeking a more human, more hopeful way forward.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“In Seeking Soteria, the author, Eugene Larkin, has quietly but powerfully described the challenges of helping people who are coping with ‘extreme mental states’ feel safe and protected in a therapeutic community while finding their way back to themselves and their lives. This is an important book.”
Courtenay Harding, PhD, Retired Professor of Psychiatry
Author of Recovery from Schizophrenia: Evidence, History, and Hope
“Simply said, Seeking Soteria is a gem. Eugene Larkin’s writing style is pure delight. Through the telling of his story, we learn about the magic of Soteria House—the compassionate treatment of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Soteria study was a very successful program in the 1970s, and this book puts you right there. Whether you already know about Soteria House and want to learn what it was really like, or are just somebody interested in the human condition, Seeking Soteria is for you.”
Jim Gottstein, Author of The Zyprexa Papers
“Every so often, a crack in the system opens up, and some light gets in, showing us a better way to live together. This is the light that shines through Seeking Soteria. Eugene Larkin’s memoir is one of those underground publications that could literally overturn the status quo on mental health care. Read this book, think about it, and start living it.”
David Healy, MD FRCPsych, Professor of Psychiatry
Author of Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare’s Castaways and Let Them Eat Prozac
“Seeking Soteria is a story of redemption and a convincing critique of our mental health system. Rich and compelling, Larkin recounts his experience working in an experimental treatment program for psychosis and provides deep, perceptive portraits of the people he met there. His story is deceptively profound, and the reader will come away with a guide to becoming more fully human.”
Albert Galves, Ph.D., author of Harness Your Dark Side
“A wise, sensitive, and inspiring book… A lucid exposition of what is wrong with an overly biomedical psychiatry and how Soteria provides a coherent, humane, therapeutic alternative. This book, Seeking Soteria, belongs on the shelf of everyone seeking a better way in psychiatry.”
Pesach Lichtenberg, M.D., Clinical Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Founding Director of the Soteria Unit at Kfar Shaul Hospital, and Founder of Soteria Israel
About the Author: Eugene Larkin
Eugene Larkin was directly involved in Soteria House, first as a volunteer and then as staff. He left Soteria House to go to San Francisco to help establish Diabasis, a similar, Jungian based treatment program, with renowned Jungian Psychiatrist, John Weir Perry. In 1974, he was brought back by Alma Menn, the Director of the Soteria Project and Loren Mosher, Director of the Center for the Research of Schizophrenia at NIMH, to establish and become the Program Director of Emanon, the NIMH-funded replication study of Soteria House. In 1976, he was brought into The Phoenix Programs in Contra Costa County, in the Bay Area, to help them convert their existing residential programs into this more humane and effective treatment model. In 1978 he became Clinical Director for all of Phoenix Programs and acted as advisor to several new, culturally specific, programs. These programs included Nyumba Chuki, a residential treatment program for African Americans in Richmond, Ca. and Casa Cecilio Chi, a residential treatment program for Latinos in San Pablo, CA.
Eugene is a member of various non-profit organizations focused on supporting and promoting the Soteria Model and has asssisted on establishing a Soteria House in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Buy “Seeking Soteria.” Coming soon to Amazon.com
Seeking Soteria
by Eugene Larkin