*PRA is sharing this book because Dr. Ragins is a PRA James Beard Lifetime Award recipient, and it may be of interest to our members.  PRA is not involved with the book's production or sale in any way.* 

Dr. Mark Ragins may be a familiar name to many of you.  He won PRA’s James Beard lifetime award in 2011 for his leadership at the MHALA Village and of the recovery movement.  You may have read some of his numerous articles or attended one of his lectures or workshops.  He has just written an extraordinary new book. 

Journeys Beyond the Frontier:  A Rebellious Guide to Psychosis and Other Extraordinary Experiences is the most sensitive and comprehensive guidebook for psychosis available today. It rebels against the pervasive, simplistic, illness-centered, medical model used in our mental health system, using hundreds of touching stories to describe in everyday language the understandings, the emotional strengths, and the practical tools we need for more humane and effective approaches.  Step-by-step he shows us how we can understand the journeys people are going through, relate to them and travel with them, make collaborative recovery plans (often including using medications more effectively), avoid chronicity and disability, and likely even prevent a good deal of psychosis from emerging in the first place.

You can buy a paperback or kindle edition at  Journeys Beyond the Frontier: A Rebellious Guide to Psychosis and Other Extraordinary Experiences: Ragins, Mark: 9798714629495: Amazon.com: Books  There’s a description of the book and reviews there and you can sample it.

Reading this book makes you feel like you’re with him as he’s describing people he worked hard to connect to and help recover, including plenty of practical tips.  The stories might remind you why you love this field, you can share his explanations with the people you work with, and reading it can help give people new to psychosis the inspiration they need to emotionally connect with people and escape hopelessness.  In addition to his novel “psychosis triangle” there are plenty of other innovative ideas including medicating with meaning, a harm reduction approach to suicide prevention, a refugee camp approach to hospitalizations, a new framing of spiritual psychosis, and much more to keep you reading.

Dr. Ragins did a lecture describing some of the content of the book as a keynote with panel discussion at a CASRA conference in October 2020.   You can watch it here:  https://youtu.be/6-LZL2NvT1Qas or through his website markragins.com.