Voices in Psychosis

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Charles Fernyhough editor Angela Woods editor Ben Alderson-Day editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:8th Sep '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Voices in Psychosis cover

Voice-hearing experiences associated with psychosis are highly varied, frequently distressing, poorly understood, and deeply stigmatised, even within mental health settings. Voices in Psychosis responds to the urgent need for new ways of listening to and making sense of these experiences. It brings multiple disciplinary, clinical, and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who hear voices and who have accessed Early Intervention in Psychosis services. The book addresses the social, clinical, and research contexts in which the interviews took place, thoroughly investigating the embodied, multisensory, affective, linguistic, spatial, and relational qualities of voice-hearing experiences. The nature, politics, and consequences of these analytic endeavours is a focus of critical reflection throughout. Each chapter gives a multifaceted insight into the experiences of voice-hearers in the North East of England and to their wider resonance in contexts ranging from medieval mysticism to Amazonian shamanism, from the nineteenth-century novel to the twenty-first century survivor movement. By deepening and extending our understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way, the book will be an invaluable resource not only for academics in the field, but for mental health practitioners and members of the voice-hearing community. An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.

The book will be of immense interest to mental health practitioners who face the challenges of therapeutic work with persons who hear voices. Of particular interest is the final section: four essays address the thorny question of what hearing voices can reveal about the human mind and the way it processes hallucination. In sum, the 28 essays will appeal to an audience beyond the walls of academe that will certainly include clinicians, mental health activists, and survivors. * Choice *

ISBN: 9780192898388

Dimensions: 253mm x 178mm x 20mm

Weight: 656g

272 pages