With advances in medical technology and with many large scale, longitudinal studies now underway, social and biological science have built a convincing case that the varieties of madness subsumed by the label schizophrenia are created, fueled, and sustained by genetic, biochemical and environmental factors. However, with the ever more detailed models of the neurobiological and social systems out of which schizophrenia is born, it is possible to overlook how suffering persons actually experience their symptoms and navigate their way through life.

This book is unique in focusing on the experiences of those who have schizophrenia, and who must make sense of and live with this condition. It explores how schizophrenia disrupts person's experiences of themselves as beings in the world and how that disruption poses enduring barriers to recovery - barriers not reducible to issues of social justice or biology. After presenting a model of how disturbances in self-experience are related to but not identical with symptoms and dysfunction, it looks at the implications for the development of therapies that might provide greater opportunities for recovery.

The book provides a highly readable and humane examination of this common condition.