All right, welcome to the podcast. I am joined with Stain Van Hulow. He is a PhD

psychology, clinical psychology psychoanalyst at Gettin University in Belgium. He wrote a recent book called Why Psychosis is not so crazy.

He has over 220 peer-reviewed papers and seven monographs and has studied this extensively and welcome to the podcast. Hi, David.

So I think it's always good to start out with kind of like, what is your elevator pitch for why you wrote this specific book and what the book hopes to communicate?

Yeah, so this is a book in which I try to explain to a very broad audience, meaning both of professionals,

but like nurses and social workers, but also like families, and people who have problems with

psychosis to bring them a message about psychosis, a message about what is a psychotic experience,

and why is it not a fatal experience? Because I experienced in my clinical practice.

And also when I talk to people,

that many people have a very negative idea about psychosis.

And I want to shake that idea a little bit

by adding like a more subjective perspective,

like what is happening to someone and how,

and why is it not the end of the world when you start struggling with psychotic experiences?

Yeah, that is great. I always want to increase empathy, especially for things that seem very scary.

I think what I've experienced is that a lot of therapists specifically and there will be a lot of therapists who are listening to this or still somewhat intimidated maybe working with patients with schizophrenia

and psychosis and at least if they're early career clinicians, they may be that way.

So I think this will be helpful.

And it's a lot more common in the general population than maybe we would think.

Tell me how common is it and

beyond schizophrenia, beyond that level of severity.

Well, the good thing is that there has been quite some epidemiological research in the

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