The Entanglement of Culture and Psychosis

Featuring contributions from a variety of international voices, this volume draws on a range of disciplinary, practice, and experiential perspectives to offer new understandings of relationships between culture and psychosis. Taking neither culture nor psychosis as neatly defined, the chapters trace how individual illness and recovery experiences, treatment paradigms, and diagnostic categories are all culturally shaped. Together, they illustrate that paying attention to culture is crucial to understanding the complexities of lived experiences, as well as the workings of culture in biomedicine and psychiatry. Offering a sensitive and multi-vocal approach to the topic, the book is an innovative, timely, and theoretically robust contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mental health science. This important book will be of interest to mental health practitioners, students, and academics across a range of disciplines, as well as those with lived experience of psychosis.

Ingo Lambrecht is a consultant clinical psychologist in Auckland, New Zealand. His special interests include children, psychosis, personality issues, and trauma. He has also worked at a Maori Mental Health Service and in other leadership roles, implementing indigenous models of care that address social inequities. He was also privileged to undergo an intense shamanic training as a sangoma, a South African traditional healer, as outlined in his book, Sangoma Trance States, based on his PhD research. Anna Lavis is an associate professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research has two core strands: lived experiences of mental (ill-)health and distress - notably disordered eating, self-harm, suicidality, and psychosis - and relationships between social media and mental health. She has published widely in social science and clinical journals and is the series editor of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) Book Series.

Introduction.Reflecting on the Entanglement of Culture and Psychosis Section 1: From the Individual to the Cultural: Subjectivity and Experience in Context 1.Introduction to Culture and Hallucinations 2.The Intersect between Heavy Metal Music Culture and Experiences of 'Psychosis' 3.Hallucinations, Delusions and Psychotic Experience in the Arab World 4.Mysticism and Madness: A Matter of Perspective? 5.Visionary Reality, Culture and Psychosis: Dialogues with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) 6.Tino Rangatiratanga (Self-determination) 7.Psychosis as an Extreme State: Some Reflections from an Edge Section 2: Collective Psyches: Culture, Society and Environment 8.Heralded Kupu o te Wairua 9.Cultural Ruptures and their Consequences for Mental Health across Generations: The Case of Ireland 10.Racism and me: A Poem and Reflection on the Relationship between Racism and Psychosis 11.What's in a Word - Schizophrenia or Psychosis, Vulnerability or Sensitivity, Recovery or Discovery? 12.Hearing Distressing Voices, Climate Change, and Moral Agency among Maasai Women of Northern Tanzania 13.Freedom Section 3: Healing Systems and Recovery across Contexts 14.Mental Health and Healing in Former French African Colonies 15.Cassandra's Prophetic Knowledge: Trauma, Psychosis, and Culture 16.An Interdisciplinary Critique of Culture, Psychosis and Stigma in Singapore 17.Kundalini and Psychosis: A Personal Journey with Some Clinical Reflections 18.The Othering Culture of Western Biological Psychiatry 19.Possession in Psychiatric Hospitals: Psychosis and Culture in Rural India Afterword.A Culture of Madness