“What he hears is normal, it’s his fear”

'Hearing voices' can occur in asylum seekers. The voices may arise from traumas they suffered in the country they fled. They may also arise from fears caused by the asylum system in the country they seek refuge in. What the voices say can make sense, given what the person is going through. Safety and community …

50-to-life: Why the phenomenology of ‘hearing voices’ matters

The experience of “hearing voices” has been reported for millennia, including by people such as Socrates, Joan of Arc, and the Beach Boy’s Brian Wilson. It can be experienced in the context of a diagnosed psychiatric disorder (e.g., schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, anorexia), a neurological disorder, or by people without any diagnosis who may …

Schizophrenia is not a mental disorder?

There has been a lot of debate over the past decades about the reliability and validity of the diagnosis of schizophrenia. There has been the Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label, books such as Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, and most recently a 2016 paper in the British Medical Journal with a very unambiguous title: Despite such arguments, …

Hallucinations and a brain wrinkle?

A recent study I was involved in, led by my colleagues at Cambridge University, found a relation between the length of a specific groove in the frontal lobe of the brain (formally termed the paracingulate sulcus, although dubbed a 'brain wrinkle' by the BBC) and the likelihood that a person diagnosed with schizophrenia will have experienced hallucinations. You can discover more about …

How do antipsychotic drugs have their effect?

Today I’d like to draw your attention to a new paper just published by Moritz and colleagues (link here), which examines how antipsychotic drugs have their effect. What did it do? This on-line study involved 95 people, who had experience of taking antipsychotics, completing a questionnaire called the Effect of Antipsychotic Medication on Emotion and …

Do people diagnosed with schizophrenia deserve organs?

 A breath-taking state of affairs Like most people working in the field of mental health, I am well aware of the stigma associated with schizophrenia as well as the appalling 15-20 year reduction in life expectancy that people with this diagnosis face (e.g., Laursen, 2011; Hennekens et al., 2005). However, I was still taken aback …

Early Intervention in Psychosis in Bondi

Last week I was lucky enough to visit the Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) team in Bondi, Sydney. Up from the hill from the world famous Bondi beach, in a quiet leafy lane with sufficient garden spiders to slight rattle a still aclimatising Englishman, the EIP team manages to seamlessly integrate research and clinical support …