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- Herausgeber: Peter Lehmann Publishing
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Tamasin Knight's book "Beyond Belief" explores ways of helping people who have unusual beliefs. These are beliefs that may be called delusions, obsessions, or another kind of psychopathology. +++ - Psychiatric treatment attempts to remove these beliefs by medication and other methods. The new approach described in "Beyond Belief" is different. It is about accepting the individual's own reality and assisting them to cope and live with their beliefs. +++ "Beyond Belief" explains the new approach in a very readable format. +++ Many psychological techniques to cope with unusual beliefs are described. These include strategies to reduce fear, strategies to increase coping and problem solving techniques. +++ Ideal for mental health professionals, service users/survivors and carers. +++ "'Beyond Belief' offers us a ground-breaking way of helping people deal with unusual beliefs. In Bradford we have found this publication to be extremely helpful to service users, workers and as the inspiration for a new self help group. I am sure that this publication will enable more people to benefit from this knowledge and approach and help us change the way we as a society approach beliefs we find unusual" (Rufus May; Clinical Psychologist, Centre for Citizenship and Community Mental Health, Bradford University, England).
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Seitenzahl: 91
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Tamasin Knight
Beyond Belief
Alternative Ways of Working with Delusions, Obsessions and Unusual Experiences
(New edition)
Foreword by Rufus May
Closing Word by Elaine Hewis
Peter Lehmann Publishing
This booklet was originally published in 2004 as print edition by Joan of Arc Project, Exeter, UK. Availability of the actualised print edition (ISBN 978-3-910546-22-6) see www.peter-lehmann-publishing.com/knight-print.
The explanations in italics and brackets are written by the author.
The publisher and the author have no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of addresses as well as URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and do not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
© 2024 Peter Lehmann, Berlin. All rights reserved.
No part of this ebook may be reproduced or transmitted or utilized in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission from the publisher. The customers are only permitted to download the ebook for their exclusive non-commercial use.
Published by Peter Lehmann Publishing, Berlin & Lancaster – www.peter-lehmann-publishing.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-3-98510-723-0
Contents
Acknowledgements
There are many people who I would like to thank for their help, advice and support throughout the process of writing this book and the research that led up to it. They are Rufus May, Janice Hartley, Dave Harper, Sarah Wright, Vicky Nicholls, Andrew Barkla, Elaine Hewis, Clare Coutts, Joe Miller, Michael Knight, Terence McLaughlin, Chris Stirk, Stuart Whomsley, Eleanor Greenwood and all the interviewees and people who participated in the research in other ways. Thanks also to The Mental Health Foundation for their financial support which partially funded the research.
Note about Liability
In referring to alternative and self-help ways of working with delusions, obsessions and unusual experiences, this book is not intended as a substitute for professional help. Should you have any health care-related questions, please call or see your physician or other health care provider promptly. The publisher, author and suppliers are not responsible if you decide against this advice. Nor are they responsible for any damage you may experience from medical or psychiatric treatment.
If you are thinking about withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs, that may have been prescribed because of unusual beliefs, it is important to realize that the problems which led to their administration may return when you stop taking them. Decisions to withdraw from psychotropic drugs should be made in a critical and responsible way. It is important to have a safe and supportive environment in which to undertake withdrawal to consider the possibility that you may experience so-called relapse or worsening of your condition. Withdrawal may not work for everyone. Sometimes the difficulty of withdrawal or the base line psychological and emotional problems seem insurmountable, so people may decide to maintain on lower amounts of drugs or fewer drugs.
If you choose to give weight to the opinions expressed in this book, that is your choice. No alternative way or self-help method referenced in this book is being recommended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and no comparisons are being made between such alternative methods and treatment with psychiatric drugs or other psychiatric intervention. Neither the publisher, author nor suppliers make any claim that their information in this book will “cure” or heal disease.
Since many individual factors (physical and psychological condition, social circumstances, etc.) exert a remarkable influence on the way to cope with emotional problems, individual statements in his book should not be interpreted as transferable advice for all other readers.
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher, author and suppliers for any injury and/or damage to persons or property from any use of any methods, instructions or ideas referenced in the material herein. Any therapy not initiated or completed as well as any use of a referral and/or subsequent treatment regimen sought as a result of buying and/or reading this book is the sole responsibility of the reader.
The publisher, author and suppliers do not accept any liability for readers who choose to determine their own care and lives.
Tamasin Knight & Peter Lehmann
Foreword
James Brown the soul music artist, who died in 2006, would not use the internet because he believed the FBI has cameras with which they can spy on people through their computers. Was James Brown deluded? Well looking at the decisions and views of some world leaders, it seems to me that delusions are in the eye of the beholder. I would suggest that whether or not James Brown had a delusion about the internet is the wrong question. I would rather ask is how did James Brown cope with this belief? In James Brown’s case it would be he did not use the Internet. It is because of Tamasin Knight’s ground-breaking research contained here in “Beyond Belief” that I am confident this is the way to approach unusual beliefs even if the person is seen by mental health services as acutely psychotic. Rather than label and try to remove someone’s unusual beliefs why not, if the person is attached to these beliefs, help them live with them?
I was facilitating a self help group the other day and we started discussing paranoia. “I don’t think paranoia exists,” said one group member. Somebody else had some agreement with this; “there is always an important message in the feeling of fear that needs to be listened to.” The self help group was called “Believe it or not!” and was inspired by the research of Tamasin Knight, that this book documents. The ground-breaking idea she puts forward is that even if someone is considered to be deluded by others, it is not the unusual belief that is the problem it is how it is dealt with.
Tamasin Knight’s work builds on the influential work carried out by researchers Marius Romme and Sandra Escher looking at voice hearing. Their conclusion was that society and the individuals within it need to accept that hearing voices is a normal experience for many people and there are many ways to live with the voices, we do not therefore necessarily need to get rid of people’s voices in order to help them. In actuality removing people’s voices has often been an unsuccessful venture. Tamasin Knight’s work suggests the same holds true for unusual beliefs, that we as a society need to accept there are many ways to perceive the world and it is how people relate to their beliefs and to the world around them that is crucial to their quality of life, not the ability to think normally or rationally.
The consequence of this thinking offers a real challenge to modern mental health services. Where called upon to intervene, psychiatry has tended to attempt to medicate away people’s unusual thinking and modern psychological and psychosocial interventions such as cognitive behavioural therapy have sought often covertly to train people to think more rationally. Rather than trying to make people think rationally, Tamasin Knight’s work suggests we should be helping people live with their unusual beliefs and get on in the world. My work as a psychologist with people receiving psychiatric services over the last ten years suggests it may actually be counter productive to try to change someone’s beliefs unless this is what the person is agreeing to. What seem more helpful is to create spaces for people to explore their beliefs and share strategies that help them feel safer and more empowered.
This book is a valuable guide to this way of helping people. It offers a refreshing alternative to the many cognitive behavioural text-books that seek to modify people’s “deluded beliefs” often without asking permission from the person themselves. In my experience the majority of people with unusual beliefs (that mental health services may describe as delusions) do not engage with therapies that seek to change their beliefs. Accepting the unusual belief and helping someone negotiate with the wider social world, does seem to be more effective and beneficial. Traditionally this has been seen as colluding with the person’s delusion and taboo in mental health practice. However colluding with a medical framework of people’s problems may be far more damaging than working with someone who holds unusual beliefs in a genuinely collaborative fashion. In the hearing voices self help movement many people have shown that accepting their voices as real rather than imaginary has been helpful in their recovery journeys. For example, for many people their voices are spiritual entities. In Bradford we are working alongside traditional spiritual healers to create healing workshops that will help people deal with negative spirits. To insist on medicalising this experience is now being recognised as culturally oppressive and colonial.
