Psychosis and Schizophrenia in Children and Young People


Book Description

These guidelines from NICE set out clear recommendations, based on the best available evidence, for health care professionals on how to work with and implement physical, psychological and service-level interventions for people with various mental health conditions.The book contains the full guidelines that cannot be obtained in print anywhere else. It brings together all of the evidence that led to the recommendations made, detailed explanations of the methodology behind their preparation, plus an overview of the condition covering detection, diagnosis and assessment, and the full range of treatment and care approaches. There is a worse prognosis for psychosis and schizophrenia when onset is in childhood or adolescence, and this new NICE guideline puts much-needed emphasis on early recognition and assessment of possible psychotic symptoms. For the one-third of children and young people who go on to experience severe impairment as a result of psychosis or schizophrenia the guideline also offers comprehensive advice from assessment and treatment of the first episode through to promoting recovery.This guideline reviews the evidence for recognition and management of psychosis and schizophrenia in children and young people across the care pathway, encompassing access to and delivery of services, experience of care, recognition and management of at-risk mental states, psychological and pharmacological interventions, and improving cognition and enhancing engagement with education and employment.




Inner Speech


Book Description

Inner Speech focuses on a familiar and yet mysterious element of our daily lives. In light of renewed interest in the general connections between thought, language, and consciousness, this anthology develops a number of important new theories about internal voices and raises questions about their nature and cognitive functions.




Pretend Friends


Book Description

Little Bea has a pretend friend, so does Big Jay. Their pretend friends are very different and people react very differently to them. Little Bea has lots of fun adventures with her pretend friend Nye Nye. Big Jay's pretend friends don't make him happy, in fact they can make life quite hard for Big Jay. This full colour story book helps to explain in a child-friendly way what life is like for those who hear voices or have other hallucinations or delusions as a result of mental illness. Appropriate for children aged 4 and above, it describes why these auditory and visual hallucinations are very different to the enjoyable imaginary friends many children create, and explains some of the things that may help people like Big Jay.




Hallucinations


Book Description

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.




Did You Hear That?: Help For Children Who Hear Voices


Book Description

Did You Hear That? Help for Children Who Hear Voices is about five very different children who share one thing in common — hearing voices and seeing things that are not there.Susie is a 9-year-old who keeps her challenges with auditory and visual hallucinations a secret until a teacher alerts her parents of her difficulties at school. With compassion, empathy, love and understanding, Susie's parents encourage her to see a counselor. Susie builds trust and rapport with her counselor, which finally allows her to share her well-guarded secret. After divulging what has been troubling her for years, with her counselor's help, she discovers that she is not the only one in the world who struggles with voices.Susie then introduces readers to four other children of different ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, talents and interests who also hear voices. All of the children share with readers their challenges with voices and personal life circumstances that contributed to them hearing voices. Then they go on to speak about their personal choices regarding what role they want voices to have in their lives and how counselors helped them achieve their individual goals.Did You Hear That? is a beautifully illustrated practical therapeutic storybook for psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health practitioners treating children with auditory and visual hallucinations. While it normalizes the experience and assists children in seeking professional help, it is also an easy to understand and user-friendly guide for concerned parents, teachers, pediatricians and allied health professionals.




First Episode Psychosis


Book Description

The new edition of this popular handbook has been thoroughly updated to include the latest data concerning treatment of first-episode patients. Drawing from their experience, the authors discuss the presentation and assessment of the first psychotic episode and review the appropriate use of antipsychotic agents and psychosocial approaches in effective management.




The Neuroscience of Hallucinations


Book Description

Hallucinatory phenomena have held the fascination of science since the dawn of medicine, and the popular imagination from the beginning of recorded history. Their study has become a critical aspect of our knowledge of the brain, making significant strides in recent years with advances in neuroimaging, and has established common ground among what normally are regarded as disparate fields. The Neuroscience of Hallucinations synthesizes the most up-to-date findings on these intriguing auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, and somatosensory experiences, from their molecular origins to their cognitive expression. In recognition of the wide audience for this information among the neuroscientific, medical, and psychology communities, its editors bring a mature evidence base to highly subjective experience. This knowledge is presented in comprehensive detail as leading researchers across the disciplines ground readers in the basics, offer current cognitive, neurobiological, and computational models of hallucinations, analyze the latest neuroimaging technologies, and discuss emerging interventions, including neuromodulation therapies, new antipsychotic drugs, and integrative programs. Among the topics covered: Hallucinations in the healthy individual. A pathophysiology of transdiagnostic hallucinations including computational and connectivity modeling. Molecular mechanisms of hallucinogenic drugs. Structural and functional variations in the hallucinatory brain in schizophrenia. The neurodevelopment of hallucinations. Innovations in brain stimulation techniques and imaging-guided therapy. Psychiatrists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, and pharmacologists will welcome The Neuroscience of Hallucinations as a vital guide to the current state and promising future of their shared field.




Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine


Book Description

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.




Tell Your Children


Book Description

In “a brilliant antidote to all the…false narratives about pot” (American Thinker), an award-winning author and former New York Times reporter reveals the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug—facts the media have ignored as the United States rushes to legalize cannabis. Recreational marijuana is now legal in nine states. Advocates argue cannabis can help everyone from veterans to cancer sufferers. But legalization has been built on myths—that marijuana arrests fill prisons; that most doctors want to use cannabis as medicine; that it can somehow stem the opiate epidemic; that it is beneficial for mental health. In this meticulously reported book, Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, explodes those myths, explaining that almost no one is in prison for marijuana; a tiny fraction of doctors write most authorizations for medical marijuana, mostly for people who have already used; and marijuana use is linked to opiate and cocaine use. Most of all, THC—the chemical in marijuana responsible for the drug’s high—can cause psychotic episodes. “Alex Berenson has a reporter’s tenacity, a novelist’s imagination, and an outsider’s knack for asking intemperate questions” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker), as he ranges from the London institute that is home to the scientists who helped prove the cannabis-psychosis link to the Colorado prison where a man now serves a thirty-year sentence after eating a THC-laced candy bar and killing his wife. He sticks to the facts, and they are devastating. With the US already gripped by one drug epidemic, Tell Your Children is a “well-written treatise” (Publishers Weekly) that “takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit” (Mother Jones).




The Martian Chronicles


Book Description

The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by humans who want to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.