Psychosis is a little understood mental health condition whose sufferers often face stigmatization and marginalization. At Northeastern, professor Alisa K. Lincoln and student TaKaya McFarland are working together on multiple projects that raise awareness of psychosis and challenge the stigma so that people who have experienced psychosis get appropriate help sooner rather than later.
“We forget about prevention all the time. We focus on treatment, but there’s a lot of amazing and powerful work that shows that prevention and early identification really matter,” says Lincoln, director of Northeastern’s Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research. “There’s just a tremendous amount of misinformation and lack of knowledge about people’s experiences of psychosis, even though psychotic thought processes or symptoms are more common than we think,” she says.