Congruent with recent demands for greater attention to be given to patients' actual experiences at a fine-grained level in the understanding of psychosis (e.g. Thomas 1997) the present paper first describes one day in an actual psychotic episode suffered by the author in 1979 and then subjects this narrative to analytic and normalisation interpretations. It is suggested that acute psychotic thinking of paranoid form is critically mediated by real social events and by intrapsychic deficits in attentional capacity; metacognition; thought regulation and signal discriminative ability. Cognitive processes in delusion however, are suggested to be influenced by the presence of a threatening external locus of control. This reflects the strong social and political quality to delusional suffering. The effects therefore of victimisation on cognitive processes is suggested to be an important issue in social cognitive psychology and psychiatry.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Arieti, S. (1974) The Interpretation of Schizophrenia. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples.
2.
Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (1971) Inquiring Man: The Theory of Personal Constructs . London: Penguin.
3.
Bentall, R.P. (1994) Cognitive biases and abnormal beliefs: towards a model of persecutory delusions. In The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (ed. A.S. David & J.C. Cutting). Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum.
4.
Bentall, R.P., Kindernian, P. & Kaney, S. (1994) The Self, attributional processes and abnormal beliefs: Towards a model of persecutory delusions. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 32, 3, 331-341.
5.
Boisen, A.T. (1947) Onset of Acute Schizophrenia. Psychiatry, 10, 159-167.
6.
Boisen, A.T. (1936/1952a) The Exploration of The Inner World: A study of Mental Disorder and Religious Experience. New York: Harper and Brothers.
7.
Boisen, A.T. (1952b) The Genesis and Significance of Mystical Identification in cases of Mental Disorder. Psychiatry, 15, 287-297.
8.
Bracken, P. & Thomas, P. (1999) Science, psychiatry and the mystery of madness . Open Mind, 100, 10-11.
9.
Chadwick, P.K. (1992) Borderline: A psychological study of paranoia and delusional thinking. London and New York: Routledge.
10.
Chadwick, P.K. (1993) The stepladder to the impossible: a first hand phenomenological account of a schizoaffective psychotic crisis. Journal of Mental Health, 2, 239-250.
11.
Chadwick, P.K. (1997a) Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective - In search of dignity for schizophrenic people. London and New York: Routledge .
12.
Chadwick, P.K. (1997b) Recovery from psychosis: Learning more from patients . Journal of Mental Health, 6, 6, 577-588.
13.
Chapman, L.J. & Chapman, J.P. (1988) The genesis of delusions. In Delusional Beliefs (ed. T.F. Oltmanns & B.A. Maher). New York: Wiley.
14.
Claridge, G.S. (1985) Origins of Mental Illness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
15.
Claridge, G.S. (1990) Can a disease model of schizophrenia survive? In Reconstructing Schizophrenia (ed. R.P. Bentall). London & New York: Routledge.
16.
Coursey, R.D., Keller, A.B. & Farrell, E.W. (1995) Individual Psychotherapy with persons with serious mental illness: the client's perspective. Schizophrenia Bulletin , 21, 2, 283-301.
17.
Crow, T.J. (1980) Molecular pathology of schizophrenia: more than one disease process? British Medical Journal, 280, 66-68.
18.
Easterbrook, J.A. (1959) The affect of emotion on cue utilisation and the organisation of behaviour. Psychological Review, 66, 183-201.
19.
Eysenck, H.J. (1995) Genius: The natural history of creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
Eysenck, H.J. & Eysenck, S.B.G. (1976) Psychoticism as a Dimension of Personality. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
21.
Eysenck, M.W. (1982) Attention and Arousal. Berlin , Heidelberg: Springer Verlag .
22.
Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Vols IV and V. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis .
23.
Frith, C.D. (1992) The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia . Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum.
24.
Garety, P.A. & Hemsley, D.R. (1994) Delusions: Investigations into the psychology of delusional reasoning. Maudsley Monographs 36, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
25.
Garety, P.A. & Freeman, D. (1999) Cognitive approaches to delusions: A critical review of theories and evidence. British Journal of Clinical Psychology , 38, 2, 113-154.
26.
Jamison, K.R. (1996) An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness . London: Picador.
27.
Kahneman, D. (1973) Attention and Effort. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
28.
Kaney, S. & Bentall, R.P. (1989) Persecutory delusions and attributional style. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 62, 191-198.
29.
Kelley, H.H. (1967) Attribution theory in social psychology. In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (ed. D. Levine) Vol 15. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press.
30.
Kelly, G. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.
31.
Kinderman, P., Dunbar, R.I.M. & Bentall, R.P. (1998) Theory of Mind deficits and causal attributions . British Journal of Psychology, 71, 339-349.
32.
Laing, R.D. (1967) The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books.
33.
Lazare, A., Cohen, F., Jacobson, A.M., Williams, M.W., Mignone, R.J. & Zisook, S. (1972) The walk-in patient as a 'customer'. A key dimension in evaluation and treatment. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry , 42, 872-883.
34.
Lazare, A., Eisenthal, S. & Wasserman, L. (1975) The customer approach to patienthood. Archives of General Psychiatry, 32, 553-558.
35.
Linton, M. (1975) Memory for real-world events. In Explorations in Cognition (eds. D.A. Norman & D.E. Rumelhart). San Francisco: Freeman.
36.
Linton, M. (1982) Transformations of memory in everyday life. In Memory Observed (ed. U. Neisser ). San Francisco: Freeman.
37.
Parker, G., Gladstone, G. & Roussos, J. (1998) The 'lock and key' hypothesis of depression. Psychological Medicine, 28, 1263-1274.
38.
Roberts, G. (1991) Delusional belief systems and meaning in life: a preferred reality? British Journal of Psychiatry, 159 (Suppl. 14), 19-28.
39.
Rogers, A., Pilgrim, D. & Lacey, R. (1993) Experiencing psychiatry: Users views of services . London: Macmillan in association with Mind Publications.
40.
Sutherland, N.S. (1976) Breakdown: A personal crisis and a medical dilemma . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson .
41.
Sutherland, N.S. (1992) What goes wrong in the care and treatment of the mentally ill? In Psychotherapy and its discontents (ed. W. Dryden & C. Feltham). Buckingham, Philadelphia : Open University Press.
42.
Szasz, T.S. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper and Row.
43.
Szasz, T.S. (1971) The Manufacture of Madness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
44.
Szasz, T.S. (1976) Schizophrenia. New York: Jason Aronson.
45.
Thomas, P. (1997) The Dialectics of Schizophrenia. London, New York: Free Association Books.
46.
Toates, F. (1990) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: What it is, how to deal with it. London: Thorsons .
