Our Encounters With Madness
Our Encounters With Madness
Edited by Alec Grant, Francis Biley and Hannah Walker
PCCS Books
I am very happy to have contributed to
this newly published mental health text book
Our Encounters with Madness is a collection of user, carer and survivor narratives.
These are grouped under five themes:
On Diagnosis
Stories of Experience
Experiencing the [MentalHealth] System
On Being a Carer
Abuse and Survival.
The book will be of great benefit to students of mental health, professionals, service users and carers, and to those interested in narrative enquiry and the pedagogy of suffering.
Unlike most other books in this genre, the narratives are unmediated. Written by ‘experts by experience’, there are no professional biomedical or psychotherapeutic commentaries, whichoften serve to capture and tame, or sanitise, such stories of direct experience.
“All the authors of these stories have suffered: some from what was inflicted on them as children,some from demons that seem to have been simply part of who they are or were, and some from the failure – at worst the betrayal – of what are supposed to be helping professions. The authors have also found resources for survival, and change, and the discovery of purpose in their lives…Which is why I understand this book as an exemplar of narrative healing. Professional intervention might begin with offering people the great gift of examples not to imitate, but from which to draw resources, which is what this book does.”
Professor Arthur Frank, from the Foreword to Our Encounters With Madness
Link to Judith Haire’s post on The Patient Experience Website http://www.patient-experience.com/index.php/our-encounters-with-madness-a-new-book-on-mental-health/
Far be it from me - 
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