Unimaginable Storms: A Search for Meaning in Psychosis - Softcover

'In this important book, written with his colleague Paul Williams, Murray Jackson illustrates methods of psychodynamic assessment and treatment with unique clarity by recorded interviews. The authors point the way towards developing optimal treatment procedures - multidisciplinary in the true sense. The implications for psychiatrists and health services are challengining. The routine treatment of schizophrenia entails rapid neuroleptisation, early discharge into the community and a strong likelihood of relapse, readmission and deteriation. Optimal treatment offers a better deal: suffering may be reduced, relapse rates lowered and the patient's quality of life is likely to be immeasurably enhanced.'- Professor Robert H. Cawley, Emeritus Professor of Psychological Medicine in the University of London'Jackson and Williams have undertaken a painstaking and in-depth research effort which is elegantly detailed in this work. The lay public, the mental health public, and future victims of schizophrenia are in their debt for the authors' convincing efforts. They have done for schizophrenics and other psychotics something similar to what was done in the Menninger Research Program for the Study of the Treatment of Borderline thirty years ago, which established the efficacy of psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy for these cases.'- James S. Grotstein'This book is an important and impressive description of an approach to the understanding and management of severely disturbed patients which incorporates the authors' psychoanalytic knowledge. The vivid and moving detailed descriptions of interviews with patients offers an unique insight into their experience, and an understanding of some of the powerful and disturbing underlying processes. We are indebted to Murray Jackson whose brave, intelligent, and humane approach to patients who are ill, frightened and confused, permeates the work presented here.'- Michael Feldman, Consultant Psychotherapist, Maudsley Hospital

A distillation of many years' work on a therapeutic milieu ward of the Maudsley Hospital, in which psychotic patients were treated with an integral combination of psychiatric and psychological care anchored in the use of advanced psychoanalytic concepts of psychosis. Compelling clinical material is reproduced to help illuminate the meaning of illnesses such as paranoid schizophrenia, catatonia, psychotic anorexia and manic-depression. Several depth interviews by the author, an authority on the application of psycho-analytic thought to the problems of psychosis are reproduced for the first time.