Making Sense Of Voices

Just under 10 years ago, the authors triggered a seismic shift in the understanding of voice-hearing. They put the powerful case for accepting and validating people's own interpretations of their voices, and showed how such interpretations often enabled people to live with them far more effectively than bio-medical approaches. This handbook for practitioners builds on this work. It combines examples with guidance on the various processes involved in enabling voice-hearers to deal with their voices and lead an active and fulfilling life.

Provides the evidence to show it's possible to overcome problems with hearing voices and take back control of one's life.

Psychosis as a Personal Crisis seeks to challenge the way people who hear voices are both viewed and treated. This book emphasises the individual variation between people who suffer from psychosis and puts forward the idea that hearing voices is not in itself a sign of mental illness. In this book the editors bring together an international range of expert contributors, who in their daily work, their research or their personal acquaintance, focus on the personal experience of psychosis. Further topics of discussion include: accepting and making sense of hearing voices the relation between trauma and paranoia the limitations of contemporary psychiatry the process of recovery. This book will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, in particular those wanting to learn more about the development of the hearing voices movement and applying these ideas to better understanding those in the voice hearing community.

13 people describe their experiences of hearing voices. The book illustrates that many people hear voices and that not everyone has recourse to psychiatry, but that there are ways of coping which enable people to come to terms with their experience. It focuses on techniques to deal with voices, emphasizing that personal growth should be stimulated rather than inhibited.

Attachment Theory and Psychosis: Current Perspectives and Future Directions is the first book to provide a practical guide to using attachment theory in the assessment, formulation and treatment of a range of psychological problems that can arise as a result of experiencing psychosis. Katherine Berry, Sandra Bucci and Adam N. Danquah, along with an international selection of contributors, expertly explore how attachment theory can inform theoretical understanding of the development of psychosis, psychological therapy and mental health practice with service users with psychosis. In the first section of the book, contributors describe the application of attachment theory to the understanding of paranoia, voice-hearing, negative symptoms, and relationship difficulties in psychosis. In the second section of the book, the contributors consider different approaches to working therapeutically with psychosis and demonstrate how these approaches draw on the key principles of attachment theory. In the final section, contributors address individual and wider organisation perspectives, including a voice-hearer perspective on formulating the relationship between voices and life history, how attachment principles can be used to organise the provision of mental health services, and the influence of mental health workers’ own attachment experiences on therapeutic work. The book ends by summarising current perspectives and highlighting future directions. Written by leading mental health practitioners and researchers, covering a diverse range of professional backgrounds, topics and theroetical schools, this book is significant in guiding clinicians, managers and commissioners in how attachment theory can inform everyday practice. Attachment Theory and Psychosis: Current Perspectives and Future Directions will be an invaluable resource for mental health professionals, especially psychologists and other clinicians focusing on humanistic treatments, as well as postgraduate students training in these areas.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

This important new book offers techniques for carers to help their family member with schizophrenia on to a recovery trajectory.