Thinking psychologically about psychosis

[Ruthie]

This wiki is an amalgamation of ideas from a thread in which I asked people what had helped them to think differently about psychosis and develop empathy for people experiencing distressing symptoms such as voices and unusual beliefs. Feel free to add to it!

Normalising/Seeing psychosis on a continuum

-Watching a documentary years ago about Romme and Escher's research are realising how normal voice hearing is.

-Completing a measure of psychotic symptoms in class and realising that in themselves, many are things experienced by the normal population.

Practical Exercises (good for teaching sessions!)

-Doing an exercise where I had to have a conversation with someone with someone else in my ear playing the role of "my voice". I still remember them saying, "Don't you hate her jumper, rip it off, go on you know you want to" resulting in much inappropriate giggling and a complete lack of concentration on my part! Suddenly I understood the "inappropriate" behaviours of people with schizophrenia diagnoses much more easily!

-Doing another exercise where you had to pretend you had an unusual belief (I think it was that the neighbours were spying on you) and then having someone either attempt to argue you out of it and someone else trying to listen and understand. Very helpful in allaying any fears I might have had about "feeding into" someones delusions.

-Another exercise - lecturer told us she had put a pink bean bag out in the corridor and we had to find it, and told us quite specifically where it was and the first group to find it got chocolate (or something) and that we had to try to believe it was a bomb and so it was really urgent we found it. I think she also said it was her daughter's and her daughter didn't know she'd borrowed it, and it was her daughter's favourite...something anyway which really instilled in us a sense of urgency to find this bean bag.

She did this at break time so there were many many people milling around, but the bean bag wasn't where she'd said it was....cue many trainees dashing up to other random students (our course was part of a university so we were just in amonbst all other lectures) and trying to explain "have you seen the pink bean bag that was there, we're supposed to be trying to find it, it's a bomb, but not really, it's part of an exercise on psychosis we're doing....." and all of us looking in places, we started thinking someone had pinched it, someone shouted out loud "look, if anyone has picked up the pink bean bag we really need it back" in the corridor........

Of course there was no bean bag. But we'd all believed there was, and that it was in a certain place, and that someone had pinched it, and we acted accordingly....

-An exercise in which the lecturer induced a visual hallucination for the whole class by getting us to focus on an image then closing our eyes, which led to seeing an image of christ

-Watching Lord of the Rings clips in class, considering the gremlin (here's where my memory fails me ..) as the voice that froddo was battling with.

Psychological ideas

-Watching the doctor who hears voices documentary. (It is on youtube if you haven't watched it). As much I thought Rufus May might have taken a few more risks than I would ever be comfortable with, I did think his approach highlighted how understandable Ruth's experiences were and how a more medical model could be used to dismiss them.

-Any work by Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood, Philipa Garety, Daniel Freeman and Richard Bentall.

-Solution Focused therapy stuff on psychosis. Dave Hawkes has done some stuff on looknig at the voices/delusions and working out what the person wants and needs from that. Using it as a clue to their solutions.

Personal experiences

-More personally, growing up in a religious family and then realising in adulthood that I didn't believe most of it. I know a lot of people with unusual ideas and believe they hear from God but who are comforted and encouraged by their experiences and who don't attract or need the attention of mental health services.

-Having someone who regularly heard voices studying alongside me at undergrad (she would frequently giggle and smile to herself).

-When I was doing voluntary work I was particularly moved by a service user's mother's description of what it was like communicating with her son when he couldn't get out of bed because he was convinced the carpet was covered in snakes. That helped me to understand how scary and isolating psychosis could be.

Books, films etc.

A beautiful mind
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Content checked by qualified Clinical Psychologist on DATE
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