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I was first introduced to Stijn Vanheule’s writings on psychosis when I was working as a community facilitator in a therapeutic community in London, England. The community was an inpatient residential house for a group of residents who struggled with psychosis and a place of transition between the psychiatric hospital and private housing. A couple of clinical psychology intern students from Ghent University in Belgium, where Vanheule is a professor, joined the community for their academic program and brought a Lacanian perspective on understanding and treating psychosis. I found that the Lacanian approach was very interesting and different from the Kleinian tradition, and I immediately began reading Vanheule’s first book on psychosis, The Subject of Psychosis .
Whereas the aforementioned book is an academic and theoretical exploration of Lacan’s ideas on psychosis, the book Why Psychosis is not so Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers (2024) is an introductory text aimed at a general audience. It provides an accessible, informative, thought-provoking, and hopeful view on psychosis and psychotic phenomena. Psychosis is conceptualized as a meaningful,
subjective, and social experience, removing some of its stigma, biological fatalism, and intelligibility. In this book, Vanheule provides an excellent phenomenological description of how it feels to be in the midst of psychosis: the I is annihilated and shattered into a thousand pieces; there is a loss of sense of reality; self and life become out of control; feelings of unreality, fear, anxiety, disorientation, and helplessness control everyday life; strange and bizarre beliefs and messages appear from outside the self; feelings of alienation toward self, others, and world dominate one’s experience; etc. In summary, psychosis is a terrifying chaotic experience that disrupts the sense of self and reality.
To illustrate the presented arguments in the book, Vanheule shares several cases of ind