Books

What I appreciate about this book is its humanity. It does not view people as empty or diminished, but approaches these experiences with curiosity, dignity, personal meaning, and choice. The two lived experience chapters are powerful, poetic, and deeply resonant, bringing these states into real life rather than abstraction.

Other chapters explore research, digital strategies, mindfulness offered in a non-coercive way, and the role of embodiment through movement. Throughout, there is an emphasis on understanding rather than fixing, and on supporting people as they reclaim their energy and life in ways that feel meaningful to them.

If you work alongside people who experience this type of extreme state, or if you have lived them yourself, I recommend spending time with this book. It is respectful, thoughtful, hopeful, and compassionate.

- Jeannie Bass

Director of Peer Support Services

Tewksbury Hospital

This earnest and scholarly book is a wonderful invitation to clinicians of all spiritual leanings and people with personal experiences of psychosis to engage in a respectful dialogue about the meaning of extreme states of mind. Without this dialogue all parties who care about the meanings expressed in psychosis risk talking at each other rather than to each other, which would be a great loss for everyone. This book encourages an essential conversation among stakeholders, clinical and personal, that examines the language and ideas we use to speak about psychosis, an experience that has deep roots in our shared humanity.

— Michael Garrett, MD, SUNY Downstate, author Psychotherapy for Psychosis Integrating Cognitive-Behavioral and Psychodynamic Treatment

In this excellent and timely book, philosophically and spiritually minded clinicians move beyond critique to develop imaginative and generative possibilities for understanding mental difference without falling into overused, and for many deeply problematic, pathologizing frames. It’s a welcome addition! 

— Bradley Lewis, MD, PhD, New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles have assembled a book that bridges different perspectives and disciplines to contextualize and complicate women’s experiences of psychosis through culture, the body, spirituality, and psychiatry. Reading Women and Psychosis itself becomes a polyphonic experience that changes how we understand what psychosis is, how it has been construed, and for women, with what consequences. 

— Annie Rogers, PhD, Hampshire College, author of Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

Women & Psychosis offers an inspiring example of how lived experience, clinical insight, and critical theory can be woven together to illuminate a complex set of psychological issues. By challenging monolithic thinking about madness – whether by psychiatrists, patients, or feminist scholars – the authors are able to explore a much greater diversity of women's experiences. A major contribution!

— Gail A. Hornstein, PhD, Mount Holyoke College and author of Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness