Making Space for the Meaning in Madness
This week, the British Psychological Society publishes its 180 page reportUnderstanding Psychosis. Like it's 2000 predecessor, it is a polemic game changer, guaranteed to challenge dogma, wobble professional pride and provoke debate on what we can and can't claim about psychosis. Psychotic experiences, like voice hearing and experiencing persistent, unusual beliefs, are framed here as part of a continuum of experience, a normal variation rather than as radically other. Most importantly, it is a report that gives hope - an emphasis that recovery from distressing psychosis is not only possible, but probable. This hope is crucial, for schizophrenia as an idea still sits in the collective conscious as the archetypal terrifying, irrational, out of control mental condition. This potent notion of schizophrenia is one that trumps any other diagnosis, and colonises the heads of those suffering and their relatives. As psychiatric survivor Sally Edwards writes, "I was labelled with all sorts; eating disorders not otherw