Recovery from "schizophrenia" and other "psychotic disorders"

I’ve had a collection of handouts I’ve given out at seminars I give on CBT for Psychosis and Trauma and Psychosis.  Just today I put these all on the web – well some are just web links anyway, others are stuff I’ve written.  You can access them all here.

A double bind was originally thought of as something that happens in communication, especially parent-child communication, where a person gets two contradictory messages, and is also prevented from commenting on the contradiction.  As described in the double bind entry in Wikipedia, “this creates a situation in which a successful response to one message implicates a failed response to the other, so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response. The person can neither comment on the conflict, nor resolve it, nor opt out of the situation.” 

Double binds, when one doesn’t fully realize they exist, naturally lead to feeling and acting “crazy.”  They were theorized by Gregory Bateson and others to be the way parents for example might cause their children to become “schizophrenic.”  The theory lost credibility however when research failed to find a significant difference in the amount of double bind type communication in families in which one person was diagnosed with schizophrenia compared to other families.

But it may be that Bateson and others were right about the key role played by double binds, they just weren’t right in blaming family communication patterns as being the primary source of double binds.  Looked at more carefully, it becomes apparent that all sorts of traumatic situations create double binds for the person encountering them. More »

I’ve recently been corresponding with a woman, let’s call her Alice, who is concerned about the part of the Eleanor Longden story where Eleanor states that “Hearing voices is like left-handedness; it’s a human variation, not open to cure, just coping.”  Alice pointed out that since some people do find a way to a place where they no longer hear voices, it is misleading to state that there is “no cure.”  She went further to say that she considers complete recovery, from psychosis or trauma, to have happened only when a person no longer experiences any kind of disadvantage due to the psychosis or trauma.  Since hearing voices has some disadvantages, this means she believes it isn’t appropriate to call it complete recovery if the person still hears voices.

My reply to her was as follows: More »

I was curious about the story linked to below, which talks about how to join a child’s imaginary world in order to relieve their distress.  This approach matches my own sense of how to work with young kids – but also, I think, is a good way of working with adults who, when they are overwhelmed, regress toward more childlike ways of relating to their imagination.  I especially like the stuff about how kids may know the monsters are not real but still need help organizing their imagination to empower themselves against the monsters.  Because the imagination is a world of its own, which we ignore at our peril.

In “rescripting” therapy, and in helping people rewrite their nightmares, I help people activate their imagination to deal with their negative imagination, memories (flashbacks), and dreams.  And I try to help people make friends with their voices, though I’m not that good at it yet.  (Making friends with voices is an important thing to attempt, since so many people who really recover have managed to do this.)

http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/11/13/coping-with-childrens-worries/9565.html