![]() ![]() ![]() Subsequently, a number of prominent voice-hearing activists began providing training to academics and mental health professionals (eg, Coleman, Bullimore, Dillon).Īs the HVM advanced as a social and psychiatric movement, a complementary literature also began to develop. Organizing peer support became an important focus of Hearing Voices Networks, and these initiatives were embraced by voice-hearers themselves as offering a safe space to explore and understand their experiences. The first national Hearing Voices Network was launched in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, and the United Kingdom soon followed. ![]() 6 In recognition of the importance of this survivor voice, the HVM has held annual congresses about voice-hearing, where experts by experience shared their stories of understanding, healing, and recovery on an equal basis to those experts by profession and/or experience who present alternative perspectives. Instead, they recommended that effective practice for supporting distressed individuals should involve trying to understand the voice-hearer’s frame of reference, supporting them to change their relationship with their voices, and promoting the valuable role of peer support for decreasing social isolation and stigma.įor voice-hearers, this paradigm provided an attractive alternative or adjunct to traditional psychiatric approaches, often summarized as “trying to silence the voices”-both of the voices themselves, 5 and of the voice-hearer’s own voice. Romme and Escher concluded that reducing and reifying voice-hearing to merely a pathological phenomenon was not always beneficial in respect to helping people to learn to cope with their voices. Diverse frames of reference for voice-hearing experiences were reported: both internal (eg, psychodynamic, biomedical) and external (eg, parapsychological, mystical, and technological). These individuals were later invited to tell their stories at the first Hearing Voices Congress in 1987, and on the basis of subsequent interviews with 300 voices-hearers, Romme and Escher presented a developmental phase model of coping with voices: consecutively the (1) startling, (2) organization, and (3) stabilization phases, each of which required specific strategies and contingencies. ![]() 4 Within it, they related a process of inviting 20 nonpatient voice-hearers to share insights on how they successfully coped with their experiences. The first article to articulate the practice and philosophy of the HVM was published over 20 years ago in this journal by Romme and Escher. 1–3 Given its popularity, the approaches generated by the HVM appear to offer an attractive alternative for voice-hearers who have not been fully helped by traditional approaches, who are searching for greater understanding and acceptance of their experiences, or who feel that their stories have not been heard or acknowledged. Within these international networks, the combined experience of voice-hearers and professionals have overseen the development of ways of working with people who hear voices that draw on the value of peer support and which help people to live peacefully and positively with their experiences. Organized into a number of local and national networks, the success of this approach can also be seen by its diffusion in the past 20 years throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, emerging initiatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia and the success of the sixth World Hearing Voices Congress (Melbourne, Australia, 2013), which was attended by nearly 800 delegates. In England, eg, there are now over 180 groups hosted in a range of settings including child and adolescent mental health services, prisons, inpatient units, and the voluntary sector. 1 The development of peer support groups for voice-hearers, known as “hearing voices groups” (HVGs), are a particularly striking consequence of this movement. This collaboration, begun in the 1980s, has since inspired an international social movement in which experts by experience (voice-hearers, family members) have worked in partnership with experts by profession (academics, clinicians, activists) to question, critique, and reframe traditional biomedical understandings of voice-hearing develop coping and recovery frameworks redefine the ownership of power and expertise and promote political advocacy for the rights of those who hear voices. The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) originated in a collaboration between the Dutch social psychiatrist Marius Romme, researcher Sandra Escher, and voice-hearer Patsy Hage, in partnership with numerous individuals with lived experience of hearing voices (auditory verbal hallucinations ). Auditory hallucinations, service-user involvement, social psychiatry ![]()
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