ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of psychotic experience and whether having experiences such as hearing voices are necessarily catastrophic. It is contrasted with psychoses, which are characterised as more severe disorders where there is an inability on the part of the person to distinguish between external reality and phenomena that are mentally produced as a result of the mental disorder. It considers the public stigma of the label of schizophrenia, but personality disorders are possibly the most stigmatising labels amongst professional mental health workers themselves. Psychoanalytical commentators have described personality disorders in terms of disruptions to attachments in early childhood which interrupt and distort the formation of ego defence mechanisms. Research with service users who have been diagnosed with personality disorders has helped to establish what is so resented by them about the label: Some felt that a more appropriate description would be attachment-seeking'.
