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By Sophia Vinogradov, MD
Over the last decade or so, our field has experienced a radical shift in our understanding of schizophrenia and other serious psychotic disorders, such as schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder with psychosis. We now understand that these are neurocognitive disorders (ie, how neural systems in the brain represent and process information). We also understand that they are neurodevelopmental disorders with genetic components and antecedents during gestation. The developmental course unfolds with increasing signs, symptoms, and cognitive dysfunction, until the onset of the first episode of psychosis during adolescence or early adulthood. Cognitive deficits are more significant determinants of functional outcome than are symptoms, although most current psychiatric treatments focus only (or mostly) on symptom management. For full article click here Charlie is a well-spoken psychologist from England who specializes in Compassion for Voices and Compassion Focused Therapy for Psychosis. Please see the interview Psychosis Summit did with him last year: https://www.psychosissummit.com/charlesmaitland This is his office website: http://compassionatementalhealth.co.uk/speaker/charlie_heriot_maitland Here is a link to a 5 minute film on Compassion for Voices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=VRqI4lxuXAw SBPR is co-sponsoring an all day workshop at Stanford for voice hearers, family members, and clinicians on Oct 13. There will also be a Psychosis Education Day at Stanford on Oct 19 . By Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Ben Alderson-Day, Vaughan Bell, Josef J Bless, Philip Corlett, Kenneth Hugdahl, Nev Jones, Frank Larøi, Peter Moseley, Ramachandran Padmavati,
Emmanuelle Peters, Albert R Powers, Flavie Waters That trauma can play a significant role in the onset and maintenance of voice-hearing is one of the most striking and important developments in the recent study of psychosis. Yet the finding that trauma increases the risk for hallucination and for psychosis is quite different from the claim that trauma is necessary for either to occur. Trauma is often but not always associated with voice-hearing in populations with psychosis; voice-hearing is sometimes associated with willful training and cultivation in nonclinical populations. This article uses ethnographic data among other data to explore the possibility of multiple pathways to voice-hearing for clinical and nonclinical individuals whose voices are not due to known etiological factors such as drugs, sensory deprivation, epilepsy, and so forth. We suggest that trauma sometimes plays a major role in hallucinations, sometimes a minor role, and sometimes no role at all. Our work also finds seemingly distinct phenomenological patterns for voice-hearing, which may reflect the different salience of trauma for those who hear voices. Link to Full Article Australia is now home to some of the best organized hearing voices network groups and collectives in the world. Prahran Mission's Voices Vic is one such group. Be sure and check out some of their exciting projects including:
Reblogged from: Hearing the Voice (Durham University, UK)
............................................. ‘Inner Voices’: Hearing the Voice in the Guardian Hearing the Voice is delighted to draw our readers’ attention to ‘Inner Voices’ – a series of blog posts and short articles on voice-hearing and related issues published online by the Guardian. Written by Hearing the Voice researchers, the articles in the series explore the scientific, philosophical and literary aspects of hearing voices. Topics covered include the latest research into voice-hearing in people who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis, the neural mechanisms underlying ordinary inner speech and experiences of hearing voices, as well as the representation of voices and inner speech in literary works such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Hilary Mantell’s Beyond Black and Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu, among other issues. The series also contains the interim findings of the “Writers’ Inner Voices” project – a qualitative study of literary creativity, designed to explore the complex ways in which writers experience the voices, presence and agency of the characters and people they bring to life. The ‘Inner Voices’ series is available in full here. In order of publication, the Hearing the Voice posts are:
A new qualitative study on participants' experiences of hearing voices network groups was recently published in the journal Psychosis. We excerpt from the study's discussion here: Participants were given the opportunity to highlight aspects of the group structure that they found particularly helpful or unhelpful. In contrast to the traditionally hierarchical nature of professional support, the HVN adopts a philosophy of “expert by experience”. The fact that groups were facilitated by voice-hearers was seen as particularly helpful in encouraging participants to be open about their experiences. Voice-hearer facilitators also gave participants a sense of hope for their own futures as they could see clear “living examples” of what could be achieved whilst still experiencing voices. The full citation for the paper is: Oakland, L., & Berry, K. (2014). “Lifting the veil”: A qualitative analysis of experiences in Hearing Voices Network groups. Psychosis, (ahead-of-print), 1-11.
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