No One Cares About Crazy People is Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Ron Powers’ exploration of his two sons’ journeys with schizophrenia, combined with a sweeping social history of mental health care and attitudes towards those with mental illness. He skillfully interweaves these separate threads, drawing the reader along from the early …
Delusions are a type of abnormal thought content that involve false beliefs that are firmly held despite evidence to the contrary. They are idiosyncratic and can’t be accounted for by a person’s culture, religion, or level of education. They’re considered a type of psychotic symptom, which can occur in the context of various illnesses, including …
I was reading a post a while back on Life In Unreality about how we need to talk more about psychosis, so I decided to chime in. In this post, I’ll talk about psychosis in general as well as my own experiences. The basics We’ll start with some basics. Psychosis is a group of symptoms, …
Safe, Wanted, and Loved by Patrick Dylan is a memoir about the author’s wife’s experiences of mental illness, how that affected the family, and the difficult journey in the direction of recovery. The book’s powerful opening line is the author’s wife, Mia, saying “Pat, I am going to prison.” At that point, she was first …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is apophenia. Apophenia is a type of cognitive bias involving the tendency to find patterns where they don’t actually exist, i.e. in things that are unrelated or random. It was first described by neurologist Klaus Conrad in 1958 …
What Is… Apophenia (Finding Patterns Where None Exist) Read More »
There’s a lot of overlap in terms used in psychiatry/psychology-speak, and sometimes that can lead to the mistaken association of words that contain some of the same parts but actually mean very different things (like psychosis and psychopathy). This post will break down some of those words and word roots to hopefully add some clarity. …
Psychosis vs. Psychopathy (And Other Psych Terms) Read More »
The International Hearing Voices Movement (InterVoice) seeks to normalize, depathologize, and destigmatize the experience voice-hearing, as well as provide support to people who hear voices, see visions, etc. InterVoice is based in the UK. There are also 28 national networks, including the Hearing Voices Network in the UK and Hearing Voices Network USA. The Hearing …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is delusional disorder. Delusional disorder falls within the DSM-5 group of psychotic disorders, which also includes schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. However, it’s different, in that its effects are much more compartmentalized. It’s rare, and the vast majority of …
I first heard of the Open Dialogue approach in the book My Beautiful Psychosis by Emma Goude. It’s an alternative way of managing psychosis, and I wanted to explore it further. What Open Dialogue is Open Dialogue was first conceived in the Western Lapland province of Finland in the early 1980s. It emphasizes listening with …
One of the most common and damaging stereotypes about mental illness is that mentally ill people are chronically dangerous and violence-prone (Corrigan & Watson, 2002). This stereotype is especially strongly linked to people with psychosis. Like many stereotypes, it’s not true in the vast majority of cases, but the general public may not realize that. …
