Suffering Insanity: Psychoanalytic Essays on Psychosis

Author(s) : R.D. Hinshelwood

Book Details

Publisher : Routledge
Published : January 2004
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 200
Category :
Psychoanalysis
Catalogue No : 20074
ISBN 13 : 9781583918944
ISBN 10 : 1583918949

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This book explores the effects of the psychotic patient's suffering on carers and the culture of psychiatric services, and makes a powerful argument for considering care in the psychiatric services as a whole system.

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When madness is intolerable for sufferers, how do professional carers remain sane? Psychiatric institutions have always been places of fear and awe. Madness impacts on family, friends and relatives, but also those who provide a caring environment, whether in large institutions of the past, or community care in the present. This book explores the effects of the psychotic patient's suffering on carers and the culture of psychiatric services. Suffering Insanity is arranged as three essays. The first concerns staff stress in psychiatric services, exploring how the impact of madness demands a personal resilience as well as careful professional support, which may not be forthcoming. The second essay attempts a systematic review of the nature of psychosis and the intolerable psychotic experience, which the patient attempts to evade, and which the carer must confront in the course of daily work. The third essay returns to the impact of psychosis on the psychiatric services, which frequently configure in ways which can have serious and harmful effects on the provision of care. In particular, service may succumb to an unfortunate schismatic process resulting in sterile conflict, and to an assertively scientific culture, which leads to an unwitting depersonalisation of patients.

Suffering Insanity makes a powerful argument for considering care in the psychiatric services as a whole system that includes staff as well as patients; all need attention and understanding in order to deliver care in as humane a way as possible. All those working in the psychiatric services, both in large and small agencies and institutions, will appreciate that closer examination of the actual psychology and interrelations of staff, as well as patients, is essential and urgent.

Contents:
Introduction. Essay One: Helping to Help:Address to Practical Carers. Essay Two: How can it be Thought: Psychoanalytic Theories of Schizophrenia. Essay Three: Suffering the Mad: Countertransference in the Institutional Culture. Epilogue: Being psychotic, being a person. References.

About the Author(s)

R.D. Hinshelwood is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He had a long interest in alternative psychiatry and worked as a part-time Consultant Psychotherapist in the National Health Service whilst also running a private practice as a psychoanalyst for more than forty years. Subsequently he became professor in the Centre For Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex University (now the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies), and is now Professor Emeritus. He has written widely on psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, as well as comparative psychoanalytic research, the psychodynamics of institutions, and a number of political topics (that make up the contents of this current volume).

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