Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, Revised & Updated Edition

Today, in a vibrant network of peer-advocacy groups all over the world, those with firsthand experience of emotional distress are working together to unravel the mysteries of madness and to help one another recover. Agnes's Jacket tells their story, focusing especially on the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends who have been working to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption that such people have a chronic illness.

A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric conditions and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein's work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia, and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.