Book Review

Abstract

Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shiftin Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis. Paris Williams. San Rafael, CA: Sky's Edge Publishing, 2012, 396 pp., $24.95 (softcover)The very descriptive subtitle of Rethinking Madness by Paris Williams is "Toward a Paradigm Shiftin Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis." The mental health care field is in desperate need of such a paradigm shift, but to suggest that a medium length book can adequately capture such a shift(especially considering the enormous complexity of this topic) is likely to appear overambitious. But Williams manages to pull it off, and he does so with a book that is a pleasure to read, offering intriguing insights to the seasoned professional while being easily accessible to the layperson.There are several factors that I believe have allowed Williams to be so successful with this book. First, he took full advantage of his doctoral program at Saybrook University, conducting three separate qualitative research studies (two pilot studies and his doctoral dissertation research). These involved deep exploration of the experiences of people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders and who subsequently went on to make full and lasting recoveries. Second, he made a tremendous effort to grapple with the vast web of existing research on psychosis and recovery, trying to reconcile the great disparity between the mainstream understanding of schizophrenia and the actual results of the recovery research (including his own). Third, Williams has himself struggled with psychotic experiences and has since gone on to make a full and lasting recovery, offering the rare insight of someone who has experienced these vexing experiences from both sides. And finally, he successfully brought together all of the major components of the research within the field, the most relevant theories that have been put forward in both the East and the West, and the experiences of his own participants, and then presented them in this book in an engagingly clear and coherent manner.The book format consists of an introduction followed by four separate sections, with each section doing an excellent job of setting the stage for the subsequent section. In the Introduction, we follow the story of one of Williams' participants, Sam, as he descends into a deep psychotic condition and then eventually goes on to make a full and lasting recovery. Williams points out the significant disparity between Sam's story and the mainstream understanding of psychosis, and also the clear evidence that mainstream psychiatric treatment was more of a hindrance than a benefit in Sam's recovery. He shows that Sam not only went on to make a full medication-free recovery but that Sam had also experienced a profound and primarily positive transformation as a result of having gone through his psychotic process.Sam's story and the many implications and questions that arise from it set the stage for Part One: Deconstructing the Myths of Madness. In this section, Williams methodically deconstructs the most prevalent mainstream assumptions about psychosis: that schizophrenia/ psychosis is a disease of the brain; that schizophrenia is a valid construct; that full recovery is not possible; and that mainstream psychiatric treatment increases beneficial outcomes. This section alone is an extremely valuable resource for both mental health professionals and those who have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders as well as their friends and family members. Williams looks closely at the major research ordinarily cited to prop up these various myths, deftly separating out the actual empirical evidence from the heavily biased conclusions and misinformation with which the general population is ordinarily inundated, and he presents all of this in the most concise and coherent format I have come across.After witnessing such a radical deconstruction of the mainstream myths of schizophrenia and psychosis, the reader is naturally leftwith the question, "If the mainstream understanding and treatment of psychosis is so seriously misguided, how else do we make sense of the 'crazy' experiences that we see in psychosis? …