Author Archives: Paris Williams

About Paris Williams

Dr. Paris Williams works as a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He offers the rare perspective of someone who has experienced psychosis from both sides--as a researcher and psychologist, and as someone who has himself fully recovered after struggling with psychotic experiences.

Schizophrenia/Psychosis – Brain Disease or Existential Crisis?

Schizophrenia/Psychosis – Brain Disease or Existential Crisis?With the most recent schizophrenia/psychosis recovery research, we discover increasing evidence that psychosis is not caused by a disease of the brain, but is perhaps best described as being a last ditch strategy of a desperate psyche to transcend an intolerable situation or dilemma. To better understand how this conclusion which is so contrary to the widespread understanding of psychosis has come about, it will help if we break down this discussion into a short series of questions and answers.

What? Schizophrenia may not be caused by a brain disease?

The emerging recovery research and continuous lack of substantiation of any of the various brain disease hypotheses have cast serious doubts about the validity of the brain disease theory Continue reading

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Full Recovery From Schizophrenia? Post #2 – Is Schizophrenia Really a Brain Disease?

schizophrenia and the human brain

In spite of over a hundred years of research and many billions of dollars spent, we still have no clear evidence that schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders are the result of a diseased brain. Continue reading

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Full Recovery from Schizophrenia? Post #1 – Essential Factors that Support Recovery

Full recovery from SchizophreniaThis is the first of a series of blog postings related to my own series of research studies (my doctoral research at Saybrook University; Williams, 2011) of people who have made full and lasting medication-free recoveries after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. This is very exciting research because it is one of the few areas within psychological research that remains almost entirely wide open. One reason it is so wide open is that most Westerners don’t believe that such recovery is possible, in spite of significant evidence to the contrary. Since there are some very hopeful findings that have emerged within this research, I want to begin this series of postings by summing up one particularly hopeful aspect of my own research, which is a group of five factors that emerged which are considered to have been the most important factors in my participants’ recovery process. But before looking more closely at these factors, we should back up for a minute… Continue reading

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