Psychosis. For many people, the word suggests a deep estrangement from shared reality. People who have psychotic experiences often find themselves banished from the realm of mutual experience and social integration, becoming increasingly marginalized over time. 

It doesn't have to be that way. Cross-cultural research suggests that people who have psychotic experiences are much more likely to recover in some countries rather than others - with the U.S. having some of the worst outcomes. New approaches to integrating psychotic experience into social life are gaining traction and showing promising results. And a growing number of people who have psychotic experiences are speaking up about what it is like to listen to their own voices - and asking their health care providers to listen too. 

At this event, we will hear from scholars who have listened closely to these experiences, across a wide variety of contexts and settings. Matthew Allen, associate professor of psychology at Point Park University, will then lead a discussion on implications for new models of care. 

Annie G. Rogers is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Hampshire College where she is Co-Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. A member of the Lacan School in San Francisco, she is a working psychoanalyst as well as a scholar. Her work on psychosis includes deciphering the ways that one may encounter language itself as an enigma in psychosis, and visual art and writing made in psychosis as a work of repairing language. A Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, A Fulbright Scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, and most recently, an Erikson Fellow at Austen-Riggs, she is the author of A Shining Affliction (Penguin Viking, 1995), The Unsayable (Random House, 2006), and Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language (Karnac, 2016)

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. Her book When God Talks Back, on evangelical Christians who learn to hear the voice of God, was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture, was published by the University of California Press in October 2016. 

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Wimmer Family Foundation, the Worlds of Being series, the Ordinary Psychosis series, and the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research (CIQR) at Duquesne University
Please send any questions or comments to Elizabeth Fein at feine@duq.edu

Elizabeth Fein and Derek Hook, co-organizers