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.