Advances in medical technology and many large-scale, longitudinal studies have built a convincing case that a host of genetic, biochemical and environmental factors bring about schizophrenia.
However, these perspectives often overlook how suffering persons actually experience their symptoms, how they navigate their way through lives beset by schizophrenia and how their response to the illness influences its development.
To address this oversight, philosophy professor John Lysaker, and his brother Paul Lysaker, a clinical psychologist, have co-authored a book that provides a unique perspective on this disorder.
Examining the problem through the dual lens of philosophy and clinical practice, Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self (Oxford University Press, 2008) explores how schizophrenia disrupts individuals' experiences of themselves and how that disruption poses enduring barriers to recovery -- barriers not reducible to issues of social justice or biology.
After presenting a model of how disturbances in self-experience are related to (but not identical with) symptoms and dysfunction, the authors present therapeutic strategies that might provide greater opportunities for recovery.
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