Hearing Voices

Understanding schizophrenia as a non-enigmatic, understandable human experience goes against a history of institutional “othering” that has sustained psychiatric legitimacy and further marginalized service-users.

In this interview for Hidden Persuaders, Camille Robcis discusses institutional psychotherapy, a French psychiatric reform movement that began during the Second World War. Robcis explains...

From Sapiens: Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role that social and environmental factors, including childhood abuse, stressful events, and poverty, play in the development of...

In the last few years I’ve developed a sincere admiration for those youth workers who specialise in working with young people pushed out onto the edge of society. I’ve witnessed, first hand, the ease with which they can broach topics that would leave many of us feeling uncomfortable. The best of them can speak about sex, violence, drugs and exploitation in a real and pragmatic way that signals a deep acceptance and understanding of the dilemmas young people face – with no blame or judgement. This ability to transform the taboo into the ordinary is something I’ve tried to develop in my own work. Through Voice Collective, a project supporting children and young people who hear voices in London, I specialise in training youth workers to do the one thing that can push them far outside of their comfort zone – talking with young people about hearing voices.

This blog was prompted by an invitation to do a guest post on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, 1 Boring Old Man. This is my response to the notion that there are certain conditions - Schizophrenia among them - that correspond more directly to biomedical conditions

Re-conceptualizing the Clinical-High-Risk/Ultra-High-Risk Paradigm: A critique and reappraisal

A video recording of the 2nd Lambeth and Southwark Mind Annual Lecture held in conjunction with BLOCK336 is now available. In this lecture, Dorothée...

The World Hearing Voices Congress will be landing in Boston, Massachusetts in August. The Hearing Voices movement is up against a lot in this culture where there's so little tolerance for uncertainty and exploration. This movement, this event, and so many people's lives depend on all of us to carry this perspective forward.

Benedict Carey at the New York Times covers the push for new programs that emphasize supportive services, therapy, school and work assistance, and family education, rather than simply drug treatment.

An international group of researchers from multiple disciplines has published a historical, qualitative, and quantitative investigation into voice-hearing in women. The interdisciplinary project, freely available from Frontiers in Psychiatry, explores how sexism, exploitation, and oppression bear on women’s’ experiences of hearing voices.

Psychologists and people with experience of psychotic symptoms publish a report on new ways of understanding psychosis.

What would happen if professionals opened their minds about the nature of madness?  What new possibilities might be created if they questioned labels such...

On September 4, 2017, psychiatrist Ronald Pies published an article titled: "Hearing Voices and Psychiatry’s (Real) Medical Model." Let's take a look at the six fundamental assumptions that the eminent and scholarly Dr. Pies assures us "underlie the model most psychiatrists actually use in their clinical work."

A free recording of last week's webinar anchored to Phil Borges' Crazywise, a documentary exploring alternative approaches to mental health, is now available. Over 4,000 people...

In this piece for Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, Hazel Croft argues for a more radical approach to mental health, exploring the impact of neoliberal...

A large observational study published in CNS Drugs sheds light on serious adverse effects of the ‘gold standard’ antipsychotic Clozapine.

Study reports on the less-examined findings of difficult and painful meditation-related experiences.

A new meta-review examines the experiences of antipsychotic drugs use among people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.

Rachel's recovery from psychiatric labelling and unnecessary treatment from CEP.

Despite the fact that clinical practice guidelines specifically recommend against the use of more than one antipsychotic at once, new research reveals that as...

“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.” “Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.

Researchers in the Netherlands compared childhood trauma and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in 127 non-psychotic individuals with frequent AVH, healthy controls, and 100 psychotic...

Individuals with lived experience and clinicians share about barriers and facilitators to guided self-help CBT for voice hearing.

“Overall, this study showed that the information and awareness campaign had almost no significant effects on the general public's attitudes toward people affected by either schizophrenia or depression,” the researchers, led by German medical sociologist Anna Makowski, wrote. “One could assume that deeply rooted convictions cannot be modified by rather time-limited and general activities targeted at the public.”

Hearing Voices Network self-help groups are an important resource for coping with voice hearing, study finds.