For many years, schizophrenia was considered to be a deep and profound mystery. It was generally viewed as unknown and unknowable-beyond the reach of science.

The book establishes for the first time that the disease may originate very early in life, even though symptoms don't appear until young adulthood. Moreover, the authors show that - contrary to prevailing wisdom - schizophrenia does not change a person's underlying personality. Weaving poignant psychological portraits of twins through the book, the authors show how these case studies support the research findings.

Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.

For Michael Fortnam, a painful level of isolation, emptiness, and confusion had become normal. Severe depression, delusions, and manic episodes tore through his life in ways that people around him couldn’t see. Finally, a crisis brought his suffering to the surface, and a shocking arrest led to a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital. It was there that he began to accept that many of his thoughts were delusional. Distorted Mind describes the experience of depression, hallucinations, and mania in a straightforward, accessible way that readers will easily empathize with and understand. Michael describes how medication and therapy have allowed him to emerge from mental illness to live a more promising and meaningful life. He is now in a stable relationship, holds a job, and has not been hospitalized since the year 2000. Michael’s story gives important encouragement to those who are suffering from mental illness or in a stage of treatment where hope is not yet clear. It also provides valuable information to family, friends, and treatment professionals about what it’s like to experience a mental health crisis, and the ways in which caring people can provide support for a successful outcome.

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.

This is the first book to address the clinical and neurobiological interface between schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). There is growing evidence that obsessive-compulsive symptoms in schizophrenia are prevalent, persistent and characterized by a distinct pattern of familial inheritance, neurocognitive deficits and brain activation. This text provides guidelines for differential diagnosis of schizophrenic patients with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and patients with primary OCD alongside poor insight, psychotic features or schizotypal personality. Written by a leading expert in the coexistence of obsessive-compulsive and schizophrenic phenomena, Schizo-Obsessive Disorder uses numerous case studies to present diagnostic guidelines and to describe a recommended treatment algorithm, demystifying this complex disorder and aiding its effective management. The book is essential reading for psychiatrists, neurologists and the wider range of multidisciplinary mental health practitioners.

Brain disordersâ€"neurological, psychiatric, and developmentalâ€"now affect at least 250 million people in the developing world, and this number is expected to rise as life expectancy increases. Yet public and private health systems in developing countries have paid relatively little attention to brain disorders. The negative attitudes, prejudice, and stigma that often surround many of these disorders have contributed to this neglect. Lacking proper diagnosis and treatment, millions of individual lives are lost to disability and death. Such conditions exact both personal and economic costs on families, communities, and nations. The report describes the causes and risk factors associated with brain disorders. It focuses on six representative brain disorders that are prevalent in developing countries: developmental disabilities, epilepsy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and stroke. The report makes detailed recommendations of ways to reduce the toll exacted by these six disorders. In broader strokes, the report also proposes six major strategies toward reducing the overall burden of brain disorders in the developing world.

Feelings of Being is the first ever account of the nature, role and variety of 'existential feelings' in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, surreality, unfamiliarity, estrangement, heightened existence, isolation, emptiness, belonging, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Ratcliffe refers to such feelings as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world In this book, Ratcliffe argues that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. He explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. He then explores the role of altered feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

An international team of leading researchers and clinicians provides the first comprehensive, epidemiological overview of this multi-faceted and still-perplexing disorder. Controversial issues such as the validity of discrete or dimensional classifications of schizophrenia and the continuum between psychosis and 'normality' are explored in depth. Separate chapters are devoted to topics of particular relevance to schizophrenia such as suicide, violence and substance abuse. Finally, new prospects for treatment and prevention are considered.

Experts discuss the potential of early intervention to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders. Mental illness represents one of the largest disease burdens worldwide, yet treatments have been largely ineffective in improving the quality of life for millions of affected individuals—in part because approaches taken have focused on late-stage disorders in adulthood. This volume shifts the focus by placing the developmental stage of “youth” at the center of mental health. The contributors challenge current nosology, explore mechanisms that underlie the emergence of mental disorders, and propose a framework to guide early intervention. Offering recommendations for the future, the book holds that early intervention in youth has the potential to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders and to reconfigure the landscape of mental health. The contributors discuss epidemiology, classification, and diagnostic issues, including the benefits of clinical staging; the context for emerging mental disorders, including both biological and sociocultural processes; biological mechanisms underlying risk for psychopathology, including aspects of neural circuitry; and developing and implementing prevention and early intervention, including assessment and intervention modalities and knowledge translation in early treatment of schizophrenia. Contributors Nicholas B. Allen, Mario Alvarez-Jimenez, G. Paul Amminger, Shelli Avenevoli, Hannah F. Behrendt, Tolulope Bella-Awusah, Maximus Berger, Byron K. Y. Bitanihirwe, Drew Blasco, John D. Cahill, Joanne S. Carpenter, Andrew M. Chanen, Eric Y. H. Chen, Shane D. Colombo, Christoph U. Correll, Christopher G. Davey, Kim Q. Do, Damien A. Fair, Helen L. Fisher, Sophia Frangou, John Gleeson, Robert K. Heinssen, Ian B. Hickie, Frank Iorfino,Matcheri S. Keshavan, Kerstin Konrad, Phuong Thao D. Le, Francis Lee, Leslie D. Leve, Sarah A. Lieff, Cindy H. Liu, Beatriz Luna, Patrick D. McGorry, Urvakhsh Meherwan Mehta, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Shreya V. Nallur, Cristopher Niell, Merete Nordentoft, Dost Öngür, George C. Patton, Tomáš Paus, Ulrich Reininghaus, Bernalyn Ruiz, Fred Sabb, Akira Sawa, Michael Schoenbaum, Gunter Schumann, Elizabeth M. Scott, Jai Shah, Vinod H. Srihari, Ezra Susser, John Torous, Peter J. Uhlhaas, Swapna K. Verma, T. Wilson Woo, Stephen J. Wood, Lawrence H. Yang, Alison R. Yung