The Experience of Psychopathology: Investigating Mental Disorders in their Natural Settings

This book is devoted to understanding the experience of distress, well-being and psychopathology in daily life, with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) in psychiatry, and contains contributions from the leading international pioneers of this approach. Experience sampling is a methodology for collecting reliable and valid data on patterns of behaviour, thought and feeling from real-life situations. It thus yields data complementary to those provided by neurobiological approaches to mental illnesses and is applicable to the study and management of a wide variety of mental disorders in their natural settings. The editor, who did much to bring ESM to prominence in psychiatry, has assembled a fascinating range of contributions, many of them previously unpublished, dealing with the diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities of this approach.