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Books Related to Living with Schizophrenia John Watkins - ISBN: 085572272X
Good none academic text to read. - Rated
This book gives a holistic approach to understanding, preventing and recovering from schizophrenia. The book is broken into three parts; the first part is the biggest part of the book where it explains what the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are. Part two is preventing and alleviating the negative symptoms. Part three is coping with the illness from the sufferer and carer's point of view.
This book is written in none jargon terms, it does not read as an academic text, because the target audience is not professionals, although professionals can read it if they have no prior knowledge of schizophrenia. The primary audience is the sufferer of schizophrenia and the carer. The author of the book is a retired psychiatric nurse of twenty five years experience of working in a clinical setting.
The book explains that positive symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. The negative symptoms being a lack of motivation, reduced emotional expressiveness and social withdrawal. The book informs that there is a lot of research into this area and the scope of the topic is more then what the book can cover, but the book talks about the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia and how the sufferer and carer can live with them.
Researchers in this field have agreed that negative symptoms are not just experienced by schizophrenia sufferers, but by anyone with or without a mental health problem. For example they can experience flatten affect or social withdrawal. They are many causes and the symptoms can be prevented or alleviated.
The book contains many personal testimonies, this helps the reader put the issue into a realistic context and some testimonies are quite moving. The reader may wonder whether the patterns of behaviour, coping mechanisms such as social withdrawal should be seen as `negative symptoms'? The book tells the reader that they would not be alone in this thought. Professor John Strauss said that this term can be misleading since it does not represent active coping mechanisms, but each sufferer; the active coping mechanisms are unique to them.
As I read the book from a carer's perspective it made me think about how the sufferer actually suffers from the illness and how it affects everything in their life from something minor to major. How every negative symptom taken on its own credit has its impact on the sufferer. I can understand more about how my mother chooses to watch the television on a low volume and is seen to be constantly making a cup of tea throughout the day. These are minor things in her lifestyle which after 21 years has clicked into place with how the rest of the illness has affected her.
The book does aspire to have their readers not to continue to have misleading ideas about the psychiatric terms used in explaining what schizophrenia is. The book ends nicely on a quote from Carl Jung which makes you reflect upon the entire book, to look at the person behind the illness and strive to live, deal with and successfully cope with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
