Nev Jones – Op-Ed Bio

Nev Jones is the Co-Director of LERN, a doctoral candidate in community psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, and the director and founder of Chicago Hearing Voices. Prior to studying psychology, she received a B.A. and M.A. in continental philosophy (with a focus on phenomenology and philosophy of psychiatry) and spent a year as a Japanese Ministry of Education and Science Doctoral Research Fellow in cultural philosophy at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya.  Within philosophy, her areas of concentration were critical psychiatry, feminist & critical race theory, and cultural studies.  Nev currently divides her time between research (focusing on participatory methodologies, early intervention in psychosis, and interdisciplinary work on the phenomenology of voices, visions & extreme states) and direct advocacy (facilitating voices groups, and working on consultation and training projects aligned with the international hearing voices movement). In the past she has worked as a project director for the NIMH Center on Adherence and Self-Determination, a research coordinator for a multi-county evaluation of the impact of the transition to Medicaid managed care in Illinois, and as an advisory board member to the National Council on Disability’s Medicaid Managed Care white paper project.  She currently serves as the user/survivor outreach chair for the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS), and is a member of the international advisory board of Durham University’s multidisciplinary Hearing the Voice project, as well as the interdisciplinary and sub-types working groups of the International Consortium on Hallucination Research. Nev is currently collaborating on interdisciplinary development projects with the International Network on Philosophy and Psychiatry and the psychiatric anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford University.  A first person account is available here; Nev has lived experience of the social welfare and psychiatric systems as well as specialized early intervention for first episode psychosis.