Schizophrenia, Psychology & Counseling, Mental Illness, Pathologies, Mental Health, Clinical Psychology, Psychopathology 

This book challenges the stigma against people with schizophrenia and the belief that schizophrenia is a death sentence using insight from personal interviews with people with schizophrenia. Author Larry Davidson asserts that recovery for people with schizophrenia is possible, defining recovery as the acceptance of one’s illness and overcoming stigma/discrimination rather than the complete remission of symptoms. He then talks the reader through the process of collecting and analyzing the personal narratives of people with schizophrenia, from interview techniques for eliciting helpful responses to synthesizing those narratives into coherent results. He finds that people with schizophrenia are not fundamentally different from anyone else; he provides the reader with some illuminating case studies of people with schizophrenia and generalizes about which factors help schizophrenic people recover, as well as the emotional barriers to recovery that they face.