Overall Summary
Delusions are complex phenomena that have started to be the focus of psychological research. Clearly, a number of factors combine in their formation and maintenance. This means that psychological therapy will draw upon a range of techniques that are applied on the basis of individual formulations of clients’ difficulties. However, what unites the techniques is the underlying assumption that clients’ subjective experiences should be taken seriously and that they can be helped to make delusional experiences less threatening, less interfering, and more controllable. This parallels the approaches taken to nonpsychotic disorders such as anxiety and depression.
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Further Reading
Reviews of delusion theories: Garety & Freeman (1999); Winters and Neale (1983); Freeman & Garety (2004), Garety and Hemsley (1994).
Recent theoretical models of delusions: Garety et al. (2001); Freeman et al. (2002); Bentall et al. (2001); Kapur (2003).
CBT for psychosis manuals: Fowler et al. (1995); Chadwick et al (1996); Morrison (2002); Kingdon & Turkington (2002).
Website: British Psychological Society: www.understandingpsychosis.com
Self-help: Freeman et al. (2006).
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Freeman, D., Garety, P.A. (2006). Delusions. In: Fisher, J.E., O’Donohue, W.T. (eds) Practitioner’s Guide to Evidence-Based Psychotherapy. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-28370-8_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-28370-8_20
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