Main description:

Making Sense of Paranoia provides a refreshing and challenging contribution to debates over mental health. Mainstream psychiatric texts tend to foreground medical explanations for mental distress, with the direct experiences and personal narratives of the sufferers themselves then used as evidence to substantiate pre-existing concepts. This book takes a radically different approach. Here, the personal narratives of sufferers are prioritised and then the prevailing theoretical frameworks are examined to see if they fit with the sufferers' lifeworld, rather than the other way round. Seen from this perspective, it is argued that we require alternative ways to conceptualise paranoia and new forms of intervention to alleviate the suffering of those who experience distressing beliefs.What the contributors to this book have in common is their direct experience of paranoia, either through lived experience, the provision of professional support, or through developing new theoretical explanations to help us understand both the influences on, and experience of, paranoia.