Authors: Elizabeth Kuipers
Year: 1999
Event: 1999 TheMHS Conference
Subject: Keynote, voices, psychosis, psychosocial approaches, family intervention
Type of resource: Audio
Abstract: Psychosis has often been feared and stigmatised by society. Traditional views of key symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations saw them as categorically different from normal experiences and therefore unamenable to psychological interventions. More recently, work on normal cognitive processing has provided evidence for a dimensional view of such experiences. There is considerable overlap between
normal and clinical populations e.g. both may hold beliefs without evidence, show confirmatory biases and have a range of responses to unusual experiences. This thinking has led to increased understanding and also to the application of cognitive behaviour interventions found useful in other distressing conditions such as depression and anxiety. A series of increasingly rigorous clinical trial are beginning to provide evidence that cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis is a useful intervention, together with medication, as it can improve both symptomatology and distress. Together with the well established evidence for the effectiveness of family intervention with psychosis, it is clear that psychological approaches are both feasible and effective even for the more difficult problems that can occur in these conditions.
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