Delusions. Understanding the Un-Understandable

Description

Delusions, in their many different manifestations, are central to the concepts of madness and psychosis. Yet what causes them remains in many ways a complete mystery. McKenna's Delusions is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle one of the mostarresting phenomena in psychiatry: an in-depth and critical review of what delusions are, the forms they can take and how they might be explained from both psychological and biological perspectives. Delusions covers key topics such as the clinicalfeatures of delusions, the disorders they are seen in, other oddities that resemble them in both health and disease and the different approaches that have been taken to try and understand them. It is an essential book for psychiatrists and psychologists whowork with delusional patients, as well as being of interest to neuroscientists engaged in research into major psychiatric disorders.

• Tackles an important subject in psychiatry that has not otherwise been widely documented

• Readers will appreciate the wide ranging aspects of the field being brought together in a single volume

• Contains an easy-to-understand account of leading theories of delusions, including Coltheart's two-factor theory and Kapur's salience theory

   

Table of contents

1. Whatis a delusion?
2. When is a delusion not a delusion?
3. Delusional disorder
4. The pathology of normal belief
5. The psychology of delusions
6. The neurochemical connection
7. Delusion-like phenomena in neurological disease
8. The salience theory of delusions
9. What a theory of delusions might look like