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.

Tags

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

Share with friends

Share on FacebookShare on Facebook MessengerShare on LinkedinShare on TwitterShare by Email

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

Add to calendar

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.

Trauma & Dissociation Journal

Hearing voices, dissociation, and the self: A functional-analytic perspective

Abstract

In the current article, we review existing models of the etiology of voice hearing. We summarize the argument and evidence that voice hearing is primarily a dissociative process involving critical aspects of self. We propose a complementary perspective on these phenomena that is based on a modern behavioral account of complex behavior known as relational frame theory. This type of approach to voice hearing concerns itself with the functions served for the individual by this voice hearing; the necessary history, such as trauma, that establishes these functions; and the relevant dissociative processes involving self and others. In short, we propose a trauma–dissociation developmental trajectory in which trauma impacts negatively on the development of self through the process of dissociation. Using the relational frame theory concept of relations of perspective taking, our dissociation model purports that trauma gives rise to more coordination than distinction relations between self and others, thus weakening an individual’s sense of a distinct self. Voice hearing experiences, therefore, reflect an individual’s perceptions of self and others and may indicate impairments in the natural psychological boundaries between these critical related concepts. One clinical implication suggested by this model is that therapeutic intervention should understand the behaviors associated with a sense of self that is fragile and threatened by others. Relations with self and others should be a key focus of therapy as well as interventions designed to enhance a coherent distinct sense of self.

Authors: C. McEnteggart , Y.Barnes-Holmes, J. Dillon, J. Egger & J.Oliver

Published in: Journal of Trauma and Dissociation

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Date: 8th January 2016

Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299732.2016.1241851?journalCode=wjtd20

Israel Journal of Psychiatry

Improving community mental health services: The need for a paradigm shift

Abstract

Background: It is now over half a century since community care was introduced in the wake of the closure of the old asylum system. This paper considers whether mental health services, regardless of location, can be genuinely effective and humane without a fundamental paradigm shift.

Data: A summary of research on the validity and effectiveness of current mental health treatment approaches is presented. Limitations: The scope of the topic was too broad to facilitate a systematic review or meta-analyses, although reviews with more narrow foci are cited.

Conclusions: The move to community care failed to facilitate a more psychosocial, recovery-focused approach, instead exporting the medical model and its technologies, often accompanied by coercion, into a far broader domain than the hospital. There are, however, some encouraging signs that the long overdue paradigm shift may be getting closer.

Authors: Longden, Eleanor. Read, John. & Dillon, Jacqui.

Published in: Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 53(1), pp. 22-30.

Date: 10 Feb 2017

Link: https://doctorsonly.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/05_Longden_Improving-Community.pdf

How much evidence is required for a paradigm shift?

Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica

‘Commentary on “Does social defeat mediate the association
between childhood trauma and psychosis?”:

How much evidence is required for a paradigm shift?’

 

Psychosis Journal Cover

Editorial: Voices in a Positive Light

 

Psychosis Journal Cover

 

What does it mean to think of voices ‘in a positive light’?

 

For the contributors to this first special issue of Psychosis, it means challenging any model that understands voice-hearing solely as the meaning-less symptom of an underlying disease, deficit, or dysfunction. Mainstream biomedical psychiatry’s account of auditory verbal hallucinations we regard as phenomenologically impoverished, actively disempowering, over-invested in unsupportable distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ voices, and ill-equipped to investigate or make sense of what is now known about the link between voice-hearing and people’s life experiences. As a result, its efforts to midwife recovery from the impairment that can be caused by some voices are at best incomplete and, at worse, actively harmful. Without downplaying the need for further investigation and critique of these dominant models, our goal in this special issue is to foreground positive approaches both to the experience of hearing voices and to the way this is conceptualised and researched.

 

 

 

Psychosis Journal Cover

Hearing Voices Peer Support Groups: A Powerful Alternative for People in Distress

Psychosis Journal CoverABSTRACT:

Hearing voices peer support groups offer a powerful alternative to mainstream psychiatric approaches for understanding and coping with states typically diagnosed as “hallucination”.  In this jointly authored first-person account, we distill what we have learned from 10 years of facilitating and training others to facilitate these groups and what enables them to work most effectively in the long term. Having witnessed the transformative power of these groups for people long considered unreachable as well as for those who receive some benefit from standard psychiatric treatment, we describe effects that cannot easily be quantified or studied within traditional research paradigms. We explain the structure and function of hearing voices peer support groups and the importance of training facilitators to acquire the skills necessary to ensure that groups operate safely, democratically, and in keeping with the theories and principles of the Hearing Voices Network.  The greater use of first-person experience as evidence in deciding what works or doesn’t work for people in extreme distress is advocated; randomized designs or statistically significant findings cannot constitute the only bases for clinical evaluations.

 

Just Saying It As It Is: Names matter; Language Matters; Truth Matters

Clinical language has colonised experiences of mental distress and alienation. Consequently, many accounts of healing and recovery seem to be about a decolonising process, a reclaiming of experience (Dillon and May, 2002). These counter narratives, which offer diverse representations of survival in adversity (hooks, 1993), follow in a long tradition of protest literature (Hornstein, 2002). From slavery abolitionists and suffragettes, to feminists and black and gay civil rights activists, who have repudiated dominant, oppressive ideologies via the language of discrimination, to challenge injustice. Many of us within mental health activism have argued that it is crucial to decolonise the medicalised language of human experience in order to contest the dominant paradigm of the biomedical model of madness and distress. After all, fighting for the rights of those labelled mentally ill, is the last great civil rights movement (Dillon et al, 2013).

Just Saying It As It Is: Names matter; Language Matters; Truth Matters

 

 

Clinical language has colonised experiences of mental distress and alienation. Consequently, many accounts of healing and recovery seem to be about a decolonising process, a reclaiming of experience (Dillon and May, 2002). These counter narratives, which offer diverse representations of survival in adversity (hooks, 1993), follow in a long tradition of protest literature (Hornstein, 2002). From slavery abolitionists and suffragettes, to feminists and black and gay civil rights activists, who have repudiated dominant, oppressive ideologies via the language of discrimination, to challenge injustice. Many of us within mental health activism have argued that it is crucial to decolonise the medicalised language of human experience in order to contest the dominant paradigm of the biomedical model of madness and distress. After all, fighting for the rights of those labelled mentally ill, is the last great civil rights movement (Dillon et al, 2013).