Hallucinations are a troublesome and distressing symptom for countless patients who suffer from psychiatric or neurological conditions. This book brings together the work of leading experts in this area, to provide a practical guide to the assessment, evaluation, and treatment of hallucinations.

These guidelines from NICE set out clear recommendations, based on the best available evidence, for health care professionals on how to work with and implement physical, psychological and service-level interventions for people with various mental health conditions.The book contains the full guidelines that cannot be obtained in print anywhere else. It brings together all of the evidence that led to the recommendations made, detailed explanations of the methodology behind their preparation, plus an overview of the condition covering detection, diagnosis and assessment, and the full range of treatment and care approaches. There is a worse prognosis for psychosis and schizophrenia when onset is in childhood or adolescence, and this new NICE guideline puts much-needed emphasis on early recognition and assessment of possible psychotic symptoms. For the one-third of children and young people who go on to experience severe impairment as a result of psychosis or schizophrenia the guideline also offers comprehensive advice from assessment and treatment of the first episode through to promoting recovery.This guideline reviews the evidence for recognition and management of psychosis and schizophrenia in children and young people across the care pathway, encompassing access to and delivery of services, experience of care, recognition and management of at-risk mental states, psychological and pharmacological interventions, and improving cognition and enhancing engagement with education and employment.

Little Bea has a pretend friend, so does Big Jay. Their pretend friends are very different and people react very differently to them. Little Bea has lots of fun adventures with her pretend friend Nye Nye. Big Jay's pretend friends don't make him happy, in fact they can make life quite hard for Big Jay. This full colour story book helps to explain in a child-friendly way what life is like for those who hear voices or have other hallucinations or delusions as a result of mental illness. Appropriate for children aged 4 and above, it describes why these auditory and visual hallucinations are very different to the enjoyable imaginary friends many children create, and explains some of the things that may help people like Big Jay.

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.

Inner speech lies at the chaotic intersection of several difficult questions in contemporary philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, these episodes are private mental events. On the other, they resemble speech acts of the sort used in interpersonal communication. Inner speech episodes seem to constitute or express sophisticated trains of conceptual thought but, at the same time, they are motoric in nature and draw on sensorimotor mechanisms for speech production and perception more generally. By using inner speech, we seem to both regulate our bodily actions and gain a unique kind of access to our own beliefs and desires. Inner Speech: New Voices explores this familiar and yet mysterious element of our daily lives, bringing together contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In response to renewed interest in the general connections between thought, language, and consciousness, these leading thinkers develop a number of important new theories, raise questions about the nature of inner speech and its cognitive functions, and debate the current controversies surrounding the 'little voice in the head.'

Did You Hear That? Help for Children Who Hear Voices is about five very different children who share one thing in common — hearing voices and seeing things that are not there.Susie is a 9-year-old who keeps her challenges with auditory and visual hallucinations a secret until a teacher alerts her parents of her difficulties at school. With compassion, empathy, love and understanding, Susie's parents encourage her to see a counselor. Susie builds trust and rapport with her counselor, which finally allows her to share her well-guarded secret. After divulging what has been troubling her for years, with her counselor's help, she discovers that she is not the only one in the world who struggles with voices.Susie then introduces readers to four other children of different ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, talents and interests who also hear voices. All of the children share with readers their challenges with voices and personal life circumstances that contributed to them hearing voices. Then they go on to speak about their personal choices regarding what role they want voices to have in their lives and how counselors helped them achieve their individual goals.Did You Hear That? is a beautifully illustrated practical therapeutic storybook for psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health practitioners treating children with auditory and visual hallucinations. While it normalizes the experience and assists children in seeking professional help, it is also an easy to understand and user-friendly guide for concerned parents, teachers, pediatricians and allied health professionals.