Drop the Disorder – And then what?!

An interactive workshop with Dr Jacqui Dillon & Jo Watson

About this event

This online workshop is aimed at people who reject the culture of psychiatric diagnosis and who want to further explore non-pathologising ways of supporting people who are experiencing emotional distress particularly when the distress has been or is at risk of being explained by society, services and many professionals as evidence of ‘mental illness.’

Jo will outline the challenge to psychiatric diagnosis and Jacqui will talk about how we can best support people without colluding with mainstream diagnostic frameworks.

There will be space for questions, discussion and the sharing of ideas making for a uniquely powerful and hopeful learning experience.

This is a limited numbers online workshop with the aim of creating a space for interaction and discussion for participants. Free and reduced places are limited and available on a first come first served basis.

About Jacqui

Jacqui Dillon is an activist, author, and speaker, and has lectured and published worldwide on trauma, abuse, hearing voices, psychosis, dissociation, and healing. She is a key figure in the international Hearing Voices Movement, has co-edited three books, published numerous articles and papers and is on the editorial board of the journal Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches. Jacqui is Honorary Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, Visiting Research Fellow at The Centre for Community Mental Health, Birmingham City University and a member of the Advisory Board, The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. Jacqui’s survival of childhood abuse and subsequent experiences of using psychiatric services inform her work, and she is an outspoken advocate and campaigner for trauma informed approaches to madness and distress. Jacqui is part of a collective voice demanding a radical shift in the way we understand and respond to experiences currently defined as psychiatric illnesses. In 2017, Jacqui was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Psychology by the University of East London.

www.jacquidillon.org

Comments from participants on Jacqui’s training….

Just want to say thank you, your perspective is so extremely refreshing and mind-opening. I’ve bought the literature and can’t wait to read more. I feel enlivened by changes in my thought process and possibilities of working with a different mind-set. This is such a simple and obvious concept and so needed, it just shows how we (society) has been conditioned to think in limiting ways about mental wellbeing. Thank you.

Loved this session and the new perspective. Much needed counterpoint to the biomedical model.

​Thank you, Jacqui, totally mind blowing! Really made me think and lots of practical skills I can use in my work.

​So grateful for you giving us this time and opportunity Jacqui…. your passion and knowledge is so inspiring. I have been able to take so much away with me. I’d love the opportunity to hear more of your thinking.

About Jo

Jo Watson is a psychotherapist, trainer, supervisor, speaker and activist. Her activism is motivated by a belief that emotional distress is caused by what is experienced and largely rooted in social factors. Jo founded the Facebook group ‘Drop The Disorder!’ in September 2016. She is part of the madintheuk.com team and editor of Drop the Disorder! Challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnosis (PCCS Books, 2019) and We are the Change-Makers Poems supporting Drop the Disorder! Jo is the organiser of the AD4E events adisorder4everyone.com and can be found on Twitter @dropthedisorder

Comments from participants on Jo’s Drop the Disorder Training

This was just what our team needed to give us the confidence to challenge the damaging ways of responding to people that have sadly become so normal. We feel fired up and ready to make a difference.

I love your zero tolerance approach to pathologisng people and how strongly it’s backed up. Thank you for sharing such useful knowledge in this training Jo!

Thank you for this afternoon and for the passion you brought to it. It’s made me feel more hopeful that change is possible.

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Online Events Online Classes Online Health Classes #counselling #psychiatry #psychology #mental_health

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Date and time

Thu, 5 February 2022

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drop-the-disorder-and-then-what-an-interactive-workshop-tickets-211006134027

AND (please note that due to high demand, this workshop is being repeated)

Fri, 4 February 2022

11:00 – 14:00 GMT

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drop-the-disorder-and-then-what-an-interactive-workshop-tickets-192237075267

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Location

Online event

Refund policy

Contact the organiser to request a refund.

Eventbrite’s fee is nonrefundable.

OrganiserAD4E

Organiser of Drop the Disorder! – and then what?! An interactive workshop.

Film image

BBC Breakfast: Jacqui and Rai talking about Hearing Voices on TV

In the run up to the BBC Horizon show – Why did I go Mad? – Rai Waddingham and I headed up to Media City to appear on BBC Breakfast show. We shared some of our experiences about hearing voices, talking about how they have become part of our lives and how we live with them. We talk about the importance of creating spaces where people can engage with their voices and make sense of them.

Jacqui Dillon Awarded Honorary Doctorate in Psychology

In November 2017, the University of East London conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Psychology on Jacqui Dillon in recognition of her services to mental health.

 

You can watch Jacqui’s Honorary Doctorate Graduation here:

Making Sense of Dissociation Raising Awareness & Promoting Healing

A rare opportunity to work with a trainer with both personal & professional experience, awareness and skills in understanding & working with dissociation.

Learning Outcomes:
• Greater awareness of the continuum of dissociative experiences.
• Enhanced confidence, responsiveness and awareness for supporting survivors of trauma, abuse and adversity.
• Awareness of effective short and long-term strategies for reducing distress and gaining control.
• Increased knowledge of working therapeutically with dissociative experiences and use of the DES-II.
• Greater understanding of the clinical relevance of dissociation.
• Acquired skills and knowledge to work collaboratively with survivors of trauma, adversity and abuse to help them reclaim ownership of their experiences and work towards recovery.

Suitable for anyone wishing to understand more about healing from trauma and working with dissociation, including mental health/social service professionals, psychotherapists and counsellors, voluntary sector workers, survivors and their friends, families and allies.

For further information and how to book a place, please visit:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-sense-of-dissociation-raising-awareness-promoting-healing-tickets-42463102282

Phoenix

Making Sense of Madness: An emancipatory approach

7 July 2017, 10 am – 4.30pm, registration from 9.30am

Hackney House, 25-27 Curtain Road, Hackney, London, EC2A 3LT

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

This unique, one day event, featuring Jacqui Dillon and Rai Waddingham (recently featured on BBC Horizon: Why Did I Go Mad?), explores experiences often dismissed as symptoms of serious mental illness: voices, visions, paranoia, unusual beliefs and altered states, and reframes them as understandable human responses to adversity.

Drawing from personal and professional experiences of madness, healing and recovery, combined with emerging innovative research findings, Jacqui and Rai present an emancipatory approach to understanding and working with distressing experiences that prioritises respect, personal meaning, self-determination and liberation.

Download: Making Sense of Madness Flyer

It includes:

  • Understanding ‘mad’ experiences
  • Exploring factors that can contribute to and shape distress
  • Alternatives to diagnosis – moving beyond the illness model
  • Respectful ways of helping people in distress
  • Strategies to survive and thrive

This day is suitable for:

  • Anyone interested in understanding more about madness, creativity and the complex spectrum of human experience
  • Those involved in supporting another human beinga – whether this is as a friend, ally, family member, colleague, mental health professional, teacher, therapist, social worker, voluntary sector worker, manager or spiritual advisor
  • All those with lived experience of madness and distress

Fees:

  • Unwaged: £10
  • Voluntary Sector & Self Funding: £90
  • Statutory & Commercial: £125

Please get in touch if you’re in a difficult financial position – we may be able to help.

Register:

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

Jacqui Dillon

Jacqui on BBC Horizon’s ‘Why Did I Go Mad?’

HorizonFor hundreds of years, psychiatry has treated voices and hallucinations as an enemy – regarding them as ‘insanity’ or ‘madness’ and seeing them as something to be quashed and even frightened of. But today, new scientific and psychological insights into how the brain works are leading to a radical rethink on what such experiences are – and how they should be treated.

Horizon follows three people living with voices, hallucinations and paranoia, to explore what causes this kind of phenomena. Providing a rare first-hand insight into these experiences, they reveal just what it is like to live with them day to day. They examine the impact of social, biological and environmental influences on conditions traditionally associated with insanity, such as schizophrenia and psychosis, and within the film they look at how new ways of understanding the brain are leading to a dramatic change in treatments and approaches, and examine whether targeting the root causes of psychosis can lead to recovery. Above all, they try to uncover why it happened to them – and whether it could happen to you.

Jacqui Dillon

See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mgxf

Out Now: New Edition of Bestselling Book – Models of Madness

Models of Madness

Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis

Second Edition

Edited by John Read, University of Liverpool, UK

and Jacqui Dillon, National Chair, Hearing Voices Network, UK

 “Truly, a revolution is occuring in our understanding of severe mental illness…This volume will serve as an inspiration, not only to established clinicians and researchers, but to the young people who will develop better services for people with psychosis in the future.” 

– Prof Richard Bentall, From the Foreword.

 

The publication is very timely given the international debate about this month’s publication of DSM-5, the latest and most controversial version of psychiatry’s diagnostic ‘bible’. Our book documents all the evidence showing that these diagnoses are unscientific and a major cause of the stigma faced by people who receive these labels. It also presents the research demonstrating the urgent need for a fundamental paradigm shift towards evidence-based, effective and humane mental health services.”

– Prof John Read, Lead Editor

Are hallucinations and delusions really symptoms of an illness called ‘schizophrenia’? Are mental health problems really caused by chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions? Are psychiatric drugs as effective and safe as the drug companies claim? Is madness preventable?

This second edition of Models of Madness challenges the simplistic, pessimistic and often damaging theories and treatments of the ‘medical model’ of madness. Psychiatric diagnoses and medications are based on the false premise that human misery and distress are casued by chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions, and ignore the social causes of psychosis and what psychiatrists call ‘schizophrenia’. This edition updates the now extensive body of research showing that hallucinations and delusions etc. are best understood as reactions to adverse life events and that psychological and social approaches to helping are more effective and far safer than psychiatric drugs and electroshock treatment. A new final chapter discusses why such a damaging ideology has come to dominate mental health and, most importantly, how to change that.  

 Models of Madness is divided into three sections:

  1. Section One provides a history of madness, including examples of violence against the ‘mentally ill’, before critiquing the theories and treatments of contemporary biological psychiatry and documenting the corrupting influence of drug companies
  2. Section Two summarises the research showing that hallucinations, delusions etc. are primarily caused by adverse life events (eg. parental loss, bullying, abuse and neglect in childhood, poverty, etc.) and can be understood using psychological models ranging from cognitive to psychodynamic
  3. Section Three presents the evidence for a range of effective psychological and social approaches to treatment, from cognitive and family therapy to primary prevention.

This book brings together thirty-seven contributors from ten countries and a wide range of scientific disciplines. It provides an evidence-based, optimistic antidote to the pessimism of biological psychiatry.

Models of Madness will be essential reading for all involved in mental health, including service users, family members, service managers, policy makers, nurses, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, counsellors, psychoanalysts, social workers, occupational therapists, and art therapists.

Download flyer to receive 20% discount from Routledge!

Models of Madness Flyer

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415579537/

 

 

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition.

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition. Co-edited with Mark Rapley  and Joanna Moncrieff. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Thomas Szasz (1960) suggested that the myth of ‘mental illness’ functions to ‘render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflict in human relations’. The medicalization of distress enables the mental health professions to manage the human suffering that they are confronted with, and also the suspicion that there is little that they can do to help. But the medicalization of misery and madness renders people unable to comprehend their experiences in ordinary, meaningful terms. In this collection we restore to everyday discourse a way of understanding distress that, unlike contemporary psychiatry and psychology, recognises and respects the essential humanness of the human condition. De-medicalizing Misery is a shorthand term for this project. The book resists the psychiatrization and psychologization of human experience, and seeks to place what are essentially moral and political – not medical – matters back at the centre of our understanding of human suffering.

Notes on Contributors
Preface; R.Dallos
Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff & J.Dillon
Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas & P.Bracken
Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle
Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando
The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper
From ‘Bad Character’ to BPD: The Medicalization of ‘Personality Disorder’; J.Bourne
Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi
Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and ‘Psychosis’; L.Johnstone
Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere
Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed
The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon
‘I’m Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs’: The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter & M.Rapley
The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff
Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch
Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double
Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes
Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail
The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel
What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon & M.Rapley
Figure: Papers Using Term ‘Antidepressant’ On Medline 1957-1965
Index

‘Despite longstanding awareness of the limitations of the medical model when applied to difficulties of human behavior and adjustment, the fields of psychiatry and psychology continue to accede to the pressures of medicine and the drug industry in their conceptualization of these human realities. Ironically, however, this medical model, eager as it is to fit so much of people’s experience into diagnostic categories, is a social construction. This book represents a significant effort to de-mystify, de-medicalize, and reclaim important aspects of the human condition.’ – Kenneth D. Keith, Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of San Diego, USA

 

De-Medicalizing Misery has assembled an impressive cast of leading mental health experts. Together they challenge the simplistic and pessimistic biological model of human distress that has, with eager support from the pharmaceutical industry, dominated the mental health field for far too long. This evidence-based, humane and optimistic book not only explains where biological psychiatry went wrong, it spells out the alternatives.’ – John Read, University of Auckland, New Zealand and Editor of ‘Models of Madness’

 

  ‘The psychiatrist or psychologist is expected to do something for every patient sitting in front of him or her, but how robust is the intellectual basis of psychiatric science when psychiatric ‘diseases’ are merely symptom clusters – clustered by us, not by nature? We are in indeed in the age of the medicalization of everyday life, when Lord Layard, economist and architect of the IAPT programme, can write in the BMJ that ‘mental illness’ has taken over from unemployment as our greatest social problem. But what is the test of ‘mental illness’? In DeMedicalizing Misery the authors examine some of the domains lamentably absent from orthodox psychiatry and psychology training programmes, with their medical model focus, and in so doing raise the IQ of the whole debate. And not just for clinicians.’ – Dr Derek Summerfield, Consultant Psychiatrist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, UK.
 

Authors: MARK RAPLEY is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, UK. He is the author of The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability, Quality of Life Research and, with Susan Hansen and Alec McHoul, Beyond Help: A Consumers’ Guide to Psychology.
 
JOANNA MONCRIEFF is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at University College London, UK and a Practising Consultant Psychiatrist at the North East London Foundation Trust. She has spent her academic career re-evaluating the nature and efficacy of psychiatric drugs and exploring the history and politics of psychiatry. She is the co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network, and has campaigned against the dominance of the biomedical approach to psychiatry, the extension of psychiatric coercion and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, in alliance with service user groups. She is the author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (Palgrave Macmillan), A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs, and numerous papers and book chapters.
 
JACQUI DILLON is the National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network, UK, and a Director of Intervoice – the International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices. She is a campaigner, international speaker and trainer specialising in hearing voices, psychosis, dissociation and trauma. She is the co-editor of Living with Voices: An Anthology of 50 Voice Hearers’ Stories of Recovery. She has published numerous articles and papers, is on the editorial board of the journal Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches and is a member of the collective for Asylum, The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry.