Featuring a Mad In America radio interview (35 minutes) with Dr. Jay Joseph, a clinical psychologist and author who brings a critical perspective to claims in the media and the academic literature that disordered genes underlie psychiatric disorders. His most…
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A UK trial has found that confronting an avatar on a computer screen helped people who hear voices to cope better with these auditory hallucinations. Patients who received this therapy became less distressed and heard voices less often compared with…
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What if psychiatry recognised that schizophrenia does not exist? How might diagnostic categories (left over from the asylum era) be replaced by spectrums of experience that show how psychotic experiences can also be normal? What if services were oriented around individuals, not the statistical groups of “evidence…
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The publishers describe this book as a “… powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness.” They continue: “The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But…
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“Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness” reveals the human side of mental illness. In this collection of interviews and essays, therapist, Madness Radio host, and schizophrenia survivor Will Hall asks, “What does it mean to be called crazy in a…
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Having a diagnosis of schizophrenia is associated with a life-expectancy reduction of nearly two decades. By some criteria, only one in seven people recover. Despite heralded advances in treatments, staggeringly, the proportion of people who recover hasn’t increased over time….
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Actually, that’s not true. Ron Powers, the author of the book with the above title , very much cares about “crazy people”. It took him 10 years to write this book, a highly personal, well thought out, historically accurate and depressing book about madness in America….
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Why people sometimes hear voices, believe things that others find strange, or appear out of touch with reality … and what can help. “An individual having unusual difficulties in coping with his environment struggles and kicks up the dust, as…
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This excellent Horizon programme (BBC2) follows people living with voices, hallucinations and paranoia to explore the causes. For hundreds of years, psychiatry has treated voices and hallucinations as an enemy – regarding them as ‘insanity’ or ‘madness’ and seeing…
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