Voice-hearing experiences associated with psychosis are highly varied, frequently distressing, poorly understood, and deeply stigmatised, even within mental health settings. Voices in Psychosis responds to the urgent need for new ways of listening to and making sense of these experiences. It brings multiple disciplinary, clinical, and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who hear voices and who have accessed Early Intervention in Psychosis services.
The book addresses the social, clinical, and research contexts in which the interviews took place, thoroughly investigating the embodied, multisensory, affective, linguistic, spatial, and relational qualities of voice-hearing experiences. The nature, politics, and consequences of these analytic endeavours is a focus of critical reflection throughout. Each chapter gives a multifaceted insight into the experiences of voice-hearers in the North East of England and to their wider resonance in contexts ranging from medieval mysticism to Amazonian shamanism, from the nineteenth-century novel to the twenty-first century survivor movement.
By deepening and extending our understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way, the book will be an invaluable resource not only for academics in the field, but for mental health practitioners and members of the voice-hearing community.
An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.
Author(s): Angela Woods, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 272
City: Oxford
Cover
Voices in Psychosis
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Copyright
Contents
Cover Acknowledgement
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations and Tables
Abbreviations
Contributors
1. Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Listening
2. Voices in Context: What Do Early Intervention in Psychosis Services Offer?
3. Reflecting on Voices
4. The Quickening
5. The Sound of Fear
6. Affect and Voice-Hearing: Past and Present
7. Bodily Sensations During Voice-Hearing Experiences: A Role for Interoception?
8. The Varieties and Complexities of Multimodal Hallucinations in Psychosis
9. Lost Agency and the Sense of Control
10. Pollution and Purity: Understanding Voices as Punishment for Un-Wholly Sins
11. Voices in Psychosis: A Medieval Perspective
12. Conspiration in the Archive: Sense-Making and the Research Interview Methodology
13. Reading for Departure: Narrative Theory and Phenomenological Interviews on Hallucinations
14. Relating to Leah’s Voices
15. The Phenomenology of Voice-Hearing and Two Concepts of Voice
16. Bridging the Gap in Common Ground When Talking about Voices
17. Silences in First-Person Accounts of Voice-Hearing: A Linguistic Approach
18. Household Ghosts and Personified Presences
19. Voice-Hearing and Lived Space
20. Vagabond Narratives: To Be Without a Home
21. Leah’s Voices: Reflections on Auditory Verbal Hallucinations as Spiritual and Religious Experience
22. ‘I Just Feel Like There’s Just Lots of People in My Head!’: Reciprocal Roles and Voice-Hearing
23. Learning to Navigate Hallucinations: Comparing Voice Control Ability During Psychosis and in Ritual Use of Psychedelics
24. ‘Then I Open the Door and Walk into Their World’: Crossing the Threshold and Hearing the Voice
25. Remembering Voices
26. Voices and Reality Monitoring: How Do We Know What Is Real?
27. Supernatural Presences: Medieval and Modern Narratives of Voice-Hearing
28. Maelstrom
Index
