Main description:

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.

Contents:

Part One: Orientations
1: Angela Woods, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough: Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Listening
2: Guy Dodgson, Stephanie Common, Peter Moseley, Rebecca Lee, Ben Alderson-Day: Voices in Context: What Do Early Intervention in Psychosis Services Offer?
3: 'Isaac' (Pseudonym): Reflecting on Voices
Part Two: The Experience of Hearing Voices
4: Gillian Allnutt: The Quickening
5: Ben Alderson-Day, Thomas Ward: The Sound of Fear
6: Asa Jansson: Affect and Voice-Hearing: Past and Present
7: Jamie Moffatt: Bodily Sensations During Voice-Hearing Experiences: A Role for Interoception?
8: Peter Moseley, Kaja Mitrenga: The Varieties and Complexities of Multimodal Hallucinations in Psychosis
9: John Foxwell: Lost Agency and the Sense of Control
10: Adam J. Powell: Pollution and Purity: Understanding Voices as Punishment for Un-Wholly Sins
Part Three: Approaching Experience
11: Hilary Powell: Voices in Psychosis: A Medieval Perspective
12: Tehseen Noorani: Conspiration in the Archive: Sense-Making and the Research Interview Methodology
13: Marco Bernini: Reading for Departure: Narrative Theory and Phenomenological Interviews on Hallucinations
14: Angela Woods: Relating to Leah's Voices
Part Four: Locating Voices in Language
15: Sam Wilkinson, Joel Krueger: The Phenomenology of Voice-Hearing and Two Concepts of Voice
16: Felicity Deamer: Bridging the Gap in Common Ground When Talking about Voices
17: Elena Semino, Luke Collins, Zsofia Demjen: Silences in First-Person Accounts of Voice-Hearing: A Linguistic Approach
Part Five: Spatial and Relational Dimensions
18: Peter Garratt: Household Ghosts and Personified Presences
19: Mary Coaten: Voice-Hearing and Lived Space
20: Patricia Waugh: Vagabond Narratives: To Be Without a Home
21: Christopher C.H. Cook: Leah's Voices: Reflections on Auditory Verbal Hallucinations as Spiritual and Religious Experience
22: Anna Luce, Nicola Barclay: 'I just feel like there's just lots of people in my head!' Reciprocal Roles and Voice-Hearing
23: David Dupuis: Learning to Navigate Hallucinations: Comparing Voice Control Ability During Psychosis and in Ritual Use of Psychedelics
24: Akiko Hart: Then I open the door and walk into their world': Crossing the Threshold and Hearing the Voice
Part Six: Voice-Hearing and Mental Processes
25: Charles Fernyhough: Remembering Voices
26: Colleen Rollins, Jane Garrison: Voices and Reality Monitoring: How Do We Know What Is Real?
27: Corinne Saunders: Supernatural Presences: Medieval and Modern Narratives of Voice-Hearing
28: David Napthine: Maelstrom