Making Sense of Paranoia: Personal, Political and Professional Perspectives
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.
Peter Bullimore is a voice hearer who spent many years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. It was only when he changed his relationship with his voices and worked through their meaning and his related paranoia that he managed to escape the psychiatric system. Peter now runs his own training and consultancy agency delivering training on hearing voices, childhood trauma and paranoia, both in the UK and internationally.
Ian Warwick is a former mental health social worker and has extensive experience in supporting male survivors of sexual abuse and rape. His academic career involved lecturing in mental health and he was also Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor at Manchester Metropolitan University until he retired from academia in 2021.
Kenneth Mclaughlin has over 30 years’ experience in social work and social care. His direct experience was mainly in the field of mental health before he moved into academia, where he worked as a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health and Social Work. He has published widely in academic and social policy fields.
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