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Psychoanalysts often shy away from offering psychodynamic treatment to psychotic patients. The hegemony of biological psychiatry has promulgated the widespread belief that psychoses have largely genetic and biochemical causes, and that pharmacological management is the cornerstone of “evidence-based” treatment. Bedeviled as we are by false dichotomies, biological aspects of psychosis have misleadingly been allowed to derogate the role of psychotherapy in its treatment.
Experiencing Psychosis challenges these attitudes by citing a wealth of overlooked but compelling evidence. It allows patients who have experienced psychosis to speak for themselves, educating us about the subjective realities of their symptoms and their beliefs about the causes of these, and spelling out what has been helpful in their recovery and what has not been. These patients constitute roughly half the book's authors; the other half are professionals who write companion research chapters.
The book cites “the potentially healing value” for patients in writing narratives of their illness and recovery. This valuable source of clinical information is one solution to the thorny confidentiality dilemmas that interfere with publishing case material written by mental health professionals.
John Read, one of the book's editors, has been a leader in investigating the role of trauma in the etiology of psychoses. In the preface, he writes:
In my twenty years of working with people who hear voices or have unusual beliefs … I was often surprised … by the disinterest of many psychiatrists … in people's life stories and understandings of the causes of their difficulties. When I entered academia in 1994 I found, too, that most researchers in the field are more interested in dopamine receptors and chromosomes than in the actual lives and experiences, and needs, of the people they are studying. [p. xvii]
Larry Davidson, who has championed qualitative research on the experiences of psychotic persons, writes a chapter