Special edition: Voices in a Positive Light

摘要

What does it mean to think of voices "in a positive light"? For the contributors to this second special edition of Psychosis, research into voice-hearing is inspiring in a myriad of ways - it offers new insights into the human condition, new methodologies for understanding and making sense of experience, and new approaches to working with voice-hearers in ways which are respectful, collaborative and even emancipatory. This special issue, "Voices in a Positive Light", challenges any model which understands voice-hearing solely as the meaning-less symptom of an underlying disease or dysfunction. Mainstream biomedical psychiatry's account of auditory verbal hallucinations we regard as phenomenologically impoverished, actively disempowering, over-invested in unsupportable distinctions between "normal" and "pathological" voices, and ill-equipped to investigate or make sense of what is now known about the link between voice-hearing and people's life experiences. As a result, its efforts to midwife recovery from the impairment that can be caused by some voices are at best incomplete and, at worse, actively harmful. However, without downplaying the need for further investigation and critique of these dominant models, our goal in this special issue is to foreground positive approaches to the experience of hearing voices, to the way it is conceptualised and researched, and to the pathways to recovery this opens.