Psychosis

Psychosis is the subject of our dialogue on Thursday July 30th. Since attending the Making Sense of Psychosis conference in february I have been reading Richard Bentall's "Madness Explained Psychosis and Human Nature" .
You can follow this link to his page at Bangor university. In my talk I will briefly present some of his central ideas:

~the artificial boundary between madness and sanity, neurosis and psychosis that was inherited through the DSMIII from nineteenth century psychiatrists Kraeplin, Jasper et al.

~the cultural nature and occurrence in otherwise healthy citizens of some symptoms of psychosis such as hallucinations, hearing voices and Bentall's thesis that madness is part of a spectrum of human nature and human behaviour and there is no clear dividing line between mental health and mental illness.

~the view of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder as biological in origin and the impact this has had in denying such patients access to therapeutic interventions.

~some research findings on therapeutic interventions including the importance of: empathy and respect, normalizing, working with "complaints" of patient rather than "symptoms", modality match between patient and therapist, efficacy of various therapeutic modalities, therapeutic alliance, educating and working with families.

~I'll provide a hand-out with Bentall's models of 'pathways to different kinds of madness', depression and paranoid thinking. I'll briefly mention the role of 'self' attribution in depression and 'other' attribution in paranoia; source monitoring and theory of mind.

~we may get time to hear about recent research by John Read of Auckland University on sexual and physical abuse and attachment difficulties and the development of psychosis. Read stresses the importance of asking every patient about trauma history and addressing the post traumatic stress aspects through listening education and empathy.

Map of the Soul: conscious & unconscious

I'm beginning Psyche Matters Dialogues on Thursday July 16th with a quick look at the history of psychoanalytic thinking about the human mind, more contemporary neuro-scientific discoveries about our brains, and most importantly how this information is applied in counselling and psychotherapy and in general relating.

I'll begin with an introduction to Freud's pioneering work on hypothesizing a part of the mind which is not under our conscious awareness or control, the unconscious.
Freud came to this conclusion after working initially with hypnosis and later with directing his patients to follow their associations. As his hysteric patients remembered traumatic childhood events and spoke about them Freud noticed that their symptoms reduced.

Many people consider that the existence of the unconscious has been debunked by contemporary psychologists and scientists but it remains a useful concept for psychotherapists who use it to explain incongruence in their patients, the sudden arrival of repressed memories and who notice in themselves and others the tendency to act differently than our conscious intention.

Freud suggested that we defend against primitive wishes and urges (id) that oppose the internalized 'civilizing messages' of our parents and teachers (superego) by repressing such thoughts and feelings but that these revisit us through slips of the tongue, our reaction to others, our behaviour and so on.
I will briefly look at his structural and topographical models, Jung's addition to the model of the collective unconscious, and Assagioli's egg diagram which contributes the idea of superconscious, the potential in us that is repressed.

I will also do a quick dive into the work of contemporary neuroscientists and their work on explicit and implicit memory, our new understandings of the structure of the brain, the neocortex and the limbic system. My sources for this is a great book: A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
Vintage Books, 2001



Other Dialogue themes follow this link: psyche matters