Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy
A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers
Stijn Vanheule, Ph.D.
An expert’s guide to humanizing psychosis through communication offers key insights for family and friends to support loved ones during mental health crises.
Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other—stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are?
Drawing on his work in psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them.
"Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy makes a vital contribution for readers who have experienced psychosis, their friends and family, as well as professionals. Stijn Vanheule elucidates experiences of psychotic crises eloquently, including what kind of life events may trigger a crisis, how such a crisis manifests and can be recognized, and crucially, the presence of someone able to listen to a person who has lost their bearings in language. Vanheule follows Freud and Lacan into a deep respect for the subject of psychosis; he speaks to the work of delusion as a work of repair, to kernels of truth in psychosis, and to the difficult work of listening, all with a minimum of psychoanalytic theorizing. Perhaps the strongest contributions in this book are Vanheule’s explanations of the ways that language can fall apart and the resulting effects on experience; and his showcasing the capacity of those who have experienced psychosis to navigate primary process fragments alongside lucidity through original creative projects sustained over time." (Annie G. Rogers, author of Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language)
Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy is available to buy from your local bookseller and online internationally from Amazon.
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About The Author
Stijn Vanheule, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and psychoanalyst in private practice (New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis and World Association of Psychoanalysis). He is the author of the books The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, Diagnosis and the DSM: A Critical Review, and Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited: From DSM to Clinical Case Formulation, as well as multiple papers on Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic research into psychopathology, and clinical diagnosis.
