Childhood Trauma and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

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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...

Stigma May Increase Distress in Individuals Who Hear Voices

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Review finds that stigma around voice hearing is connected to isolation, secrecy, and poorer functioning.

“25 Years of Madness and Modernism”: A Review

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In this piece for the Centre for Medical Humanities, James Whitehead reflects on the 25th anniversary celebration of the publication of Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism. "A...

Why Did I Go Mad?

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An upcoming episode of BBC's Horizon will follow three people who live with voices, paranoia, and hallucinations and explore various psychological, biological, social, and environmental...

The Hearing Voices Movement: In Response to a Father – ‘My Daughter, the Schizophrenic’

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There was a heart-breaking and disturbing story in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper entitled, My Daughter, the Schizophrenic’, which featured edited extracts from a book written by the father of a child called Jani. He describes how Jani is admitted into a psychiatric hospital when she is 5, diagnosed with schizophrenia when she is 6 and by the time she is 7, she has been put on a potent cocktail of psychotropic medications.

Mental Health Documentary “Healing Voices” Premiers Across 130 Communities in 8 Countries

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The producers of “Healing Voices” ­‐ a new social action documentary about mental health ­‐ are releasing the film via community screening partners in...

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Psychosis: A Valuable Contribution Despite Major Flaws

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The core of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is the idea of simply accepting, rather than trying to get rid of, disturbing or unwanted inner experiences like anxiety or voices, and then refocusing on a commitment to take action toward personally chosen values regardless of whether that seems to make the unwanted experiences increase or decrease. This idea is consistent with the emphasis in the recovery movement of finding a way to live a valued life despite any ongoing problems, but ACT has value because of the unique and effective strategies it offers to help people make this shift.

This is Solitary

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In this piece for The Atlantic, Natalie Chang explores the devastating psychological trauma of solitary confinement. "That is the legacy and the cost of solitary confinement: The...

A Glimpse Inside US Mental Health Detention Centre

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From The Sun: New York photographer Lili Holzer-Glier was recently allowed inside the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, where 35 percent of inmates...

This Mental Health Doc-Opera is Exactly What We Need

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From HuffPost: Mental health activist and filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal has teamed up with the musician Madigan Shive to create a musical documentary called Whisper Rapture:...

“How I Cope With the Three Unwanted Voices That Live Inside my Head”

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What now? I’m frightened of being labelled mentally ill.
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Advice on Coping With Voices

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What are some tactics used by voices, and what can you do about it? I hope the suggestions in this piece can help desperate voice-hearers become more understanding of the forces behind their agony, and perhaps bring a more enlightened perspective to the chemically-lobotomizing tendencies of their psychiatrists who treat voices with more medication.

Do Voice Hearers Have the Right to Refuse Psychiatric Drugs?

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In this piece for STAT, Shirley S. Wang discusses the Hearing Voices Network and its non-pathologizing, rights-affirming approach to hearing voices and alternative realities. "Many recovered...

“Social Factors Influence Schizophrenia?”

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PsychCentral covers new research linking social deprivation, population density and inequality with higher rates of psychotic symptoms and diagnoses for schizophrenia. “This is important because other research has shown that many health and social outcomes also tend to be optimal when societies are more equal.”
learning to speak psychotic

Learning to Speak Psychotic

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One of the biggest barriers that people who are “psychotic” face is one of communication: other people often have trouble understanding what they’re talking about. The way they describe their experience and their ideas are simply foreign to most people. This lack of clear communication is what gets them labelled as “psychotic” in the first place, and thus it leads to a breakdown between the “psychotic” and the rest of society. This is a loss to both groups.

Changing Minds About Voices: Action Over Words

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Sometimes the best way to make real change is just to do the work. Sometimes the talk is the work and it can be hard to separate out the two. However, in a growing number of instances, it’s hard to miss the futility of the talking and how tied up we can get in our own virtual war of words. Stepping away can be liberating. Sometimes, while everyone else is wrapped up in the talking, you can get an awful lot done.

When Hearing Voices is a Good Thing

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The Atlantic reports on Tanya Luhrmann's recent research, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry "That suggests that the way people pay attention to...

“Hearing Voices: The People Who Say Talking Back is the Only Answer”

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Journalist Emma Reynolds profiles Amanda Waegeli, Ron Coleman, Nathan Grixli and Lyn Mahboub about their experiences coming to the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). HVN was established 10 years ago in Australia and provided a support group that encouraged people to listen to their voices rather than trying to block them out. The group now operates in 25 countries.

“Why Are So Many Children on Antipsychotic Drugs?”

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“Do they make people less aggressive? Yes, sometimes they do. Will they sedate people? Absolutely. Will they make kids easier to manage? They will,” Robert Whitaker tells Liz Spikol for Philadelphia Magazine. “But I know of no study that shows that medicating these kids long-term will help them grow up and thrive. The developing brain is a very delicate thing. The narrative is that these side effects are mild, and that’s just not true, and that the benefits are well-established, and so often they’re not.”

The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

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From UPLIFT: In the shamanic view, emotional distress and psychosis signal a spiritual awakening or emergence, not a pathology. Western cultures can learn a great...

Becoming a Hearing Voices Facilitator

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For three days in December, I was fortunate enough to attend the Hearing Voices Facilitator Training held in Portland, OR. This training expanded my understanding of the voice hearing experience and equipped me with a number of tools to use in facilitating hearing voices support groups. Grounded in a feeling of community, the training was dynamic, emotionally therapeutic, and educational all at the same time – a crystal clear example of how support groups themselves might manifest in the lives of their members.

Barriers to Engaging in Self-Help CBT for Voice Hearing

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

Not So Rare But Rarely Diagnosed: From Demonic Possession to Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis

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Throughout the ages, convulsions, contortions of the body and face, including the tongue, super-human strength, catatonic periods, long periods of wakefulness or sleep, insensitivity to pain, speaking in tongues, and a predilection for self-injurious behaviours have all been offered as physical evidence of possession. The modern day interpretation, however, comes with a plot twist befitting a media spectacle. There is growing consensus in the medical community that many prior accounts of “demonic possession” may have represented original accounts of what is now broadly known as autoimmune encephalitis.

Minority and Immigration Status Associated with Psychosis Risk

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Ethnic minorities and those who migrated during childhood have an elevated risk for psychosis, study finds.

New York Times Issues Correction on RAISE Study Report

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Last Tuesday, The New York Times and several other outlets (including Mad In America) reported on the highly-touted results of a study on psychosocial treatment for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now, claims made about the study, which the ‘Times called “the most rigorous trial to date,” are coming under increased scrutiny.