Phoenix

Making Sense of Madness: An emancipatory approach

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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?’

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2nd May, 2017, BBC 2 9PM, See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mgxf

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

Listen to Jacqui’s Keynote: Recovery as Social Action: The Personal is the Political

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Via http://www.hearingvoicesusa.org/other-events-trainings/117-jackie-dillon-at-intar

A few folks from our community travelled to Liverpool, England this summer to attend the INTAR 2014 conference (International Network Toward Alternatives and Recovery). The theme of this year’s conference was “Power to Communities: Healing through Social Justice.” Evan Goodchild made an audio recording of Jacqui Dillon‘s Keynote speech: Recovery as Social Action: The Personal is the Political.

Jacqui Dillon is the National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network in England. She has also helped develop HVN USA and has been involved in our Facilitator Trainings.

Listen to Jacqui’s Keynote Talk Here:

https://soundcloud.com/westernmassrlc/jackiedillonintar2014

Hearing Voices Research and Development Fund receives $250,000 in funding

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FEMHC_Logo_horizontal(1)

Coming to a town near you: real help for voice hearers

The Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care is pleased to announce that its Hearing Voices Research and Development Fund has received $250,000 in funding for a 3-year project to bring Hearing Voices peer support groups to communities across the United States and to research the mechanisms by which these peer-support groups work.

The project will train more than 100 facilitators in 5 regions of the country and create a stronger regional and local infrastructure of Hearing Voices peer support groups across the US. People who hear voices, see visions, or experience other unusual perceptions, thoughts, or actions have long been diagnosed as psychotic and given a poor prognosis. Medications provide only partial help and their benefits typically diminish over time while destructive physical and psychological side effects become increasingly problematic.

For the past 25 years, the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends has worked to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption of chronic illness (see www.hearing-voices.org, www.hearingvoicesusa.org, www.intervoiceonline.org). A large scientific literature now provides support for key aspects of this approach, and the hundreds of peer-support groups that have developed in 30 countries on 5 continents are enabling voice hearers – even those who have been chronically disabled – to learn to cope more effectively or to rid themselves of the negative effects of their voices.

The US lags far behind other countries in offering this important new approach, and the new funding provides crucial support as more and more mental health organizations across the country seek training to start their own hearing voices peer-support groups. An open competition will be launched in April to choose the 5 project regions, with participants selected using a rigorous model in which mental health professionals and voice hearers collaborate in an intensive shared learning experience that itself illustrates HVN’s concepts and methods.

Equally crucial to the project is an ongoing research component that will allow identification of the distinctive components of hearing voices peer-support groups and better explain what enables them to provide such an effective and positive alternative for people diagnosed with psychosis. “This effort promises to be a movement that will measurably advance mental wellness and recovery for people in distress, their families and the community across the nation,” said Gina Nikkel, President and CEO of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care. “Hearing voices can be truly terrifying for the person experiencing them and for their loved ones. Hearing Voices Network support groups transform the fear into understanding and then empowerment.”

The Hearing Voices Research and Development Fund is jointly administered by Gail A. Hornstein, Professor of Psychology, Mount Holyoke College, and Jacqui Dillon, National Chair, Hearing Voices Network, England. Their more than 10-year collaboration models the kind of engaged research and advocacy that the project seeks to foster. More background on the project administrators can be found here. Read their recent article on hearing voices groups here.

Key partners in the project include Mount Holyoke College and the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community, based in Holyoke, MA, which has pioneered the training of HVN facilitators in the US as part of its broader mission to “create conditions that can support healing and growth for individuals and the community as a whole.”

Jacqui Dillon on RTE.ie Radio 1 talking about Hearing Voices

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What do you hear when you stop and listen to what’s going on in your head? A song that was on the radio yesterday? A snippet of this mornings conversation with your sister? Or nothing….? Are you debating the best route to take home? Are you saying a prayer? What does that sound like?

Jacqui Dillon hears voices. In her head. Lots of them.Voices that sound as real as you or me. Voices that wake her up. Voices that tell her to go to sleep. Voices that disagree with her, and voices that encourage her. And the voices have been there for as long as she can remember.So you might think Jacqui is mad, but this is the story of a woman who has come a long way with the voices in her head.

Twenty years ago Jaqqui’s experience of her voices drove her to psychiatric services…. and that’s where the story really begins because it was when she was told that the voices weren’t real, and that she was lying about her past that she really began to get mad. And that’s when Jacqui realised she had to learn to live with her voices and understand why they were there.

This is a story about hearing voices and about learning to live with them. A story about how your past shapes your future until you start to understand it .

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to hear voices, or have always thought that people who hear voices are plain mad, this documentary just might make you think twice.

Jacqui Dillon is the national Chair of the Hearing Voices Network in England. She is Honorary Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London.

Narrated and produced by Leeanne O’Donnell

Production Supervision by Liam O’Brien

Click here for more information on Hearing Voices Network

Click here for more information on Jacqui Dillon

First Broadcast December 7th 2013

‘Documentary on One is the home of Irish radio documentaries and the largest library of documentary podcasts available anywhere in the world. We tell stories in sound, mostly Irish ones, and each documentary tells its own story’

Listen:

You can listen here: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/radio-documentary-sounds-mad-hearing-voices-psychology.html

A presentation by Jacqui Dillon at Carina Håkansson’s Family Care Conference in Sweden from Mad In America

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BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU CAN DRIVE YOU CRAZY

Jacqui Dillon, the national chair of the Hearing Voices Network in England, discusses the work of the Hearing Voices Movement at the recent conference  ‘Presence and Participation: Arguments for the Humanistic and Sustainable Work We Do’ hosted by Carina Håkansson’s Family Care Foundation in Sweden (25-27 April 2013). To listen to Jacqui’s presentation, please click here.

The full conference proceedings are available via live streaming video on MadinAmerica.com.

DSM-5 Protest Tuesday 4th June 4.30pm onwards at the Institute of Psychiatry

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Speak Out Against Psychiatry (SOAP) are a group of former patients, carers, mental health professionals and concerned citizens who are campaigning for humane treatment for people experiencing mental distress. SOAP are opposed to forced treatment, electro-shock therapy and the psychiatric drugging of children. SOAP also promote humane alternative ways of helping people in distress.

SOAP are organizing a demonstration to coincide with a forthcoming Institute of Psychiatry conference on the DSM-5 (the latest of edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” a book published by the American Psychiatric Association which is widely used throughout the world to classify mental disorders).

The protest will be on Tuesday 4th June from 4.30pm till early evening at the Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF.

SOAP are organizing the protest as they feel that the DSM-5 makes it easier for normal human experiences to be labeled as mental illness. For example people experiencing grief can be more easily given the label “Major Depressive Disorder”, and children with temper tantrums can now be diagnosed as having “Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder”. 

A spokesperson for SOAP says “The DSM encourages a tick-box approach to understanding human distress which serves the interests of professionals and drug companies rather than the people who really need help. With the DSM-5 things have been taken a step further: even mainstream organizations such as the National Institute for Mental Health and the British Psychological Society are distancing themselves from the DSM-5, claiming it is unscientific. ”

SOAP feels the DSM-5 will increase the number of people stigmatized by a mental health diagnosis, increase prescriptions of mind-altering drugs, and further what they see as a worrying trend of everyday human problems being put in the hands of highly paid experts and pharmaceutical companies rather than our families and communities.

SOAP also objects to the DSM approach in general, where new disorders are created by committees without any objective biological evidence. SOAP highlights the fact that in earlier versions of the DSM, homosexuality was classed as a disorder but this has since been removed as it is no longer socially acceptable.   SOAP feel that, while mental disorders are frequently being changed by the professionals, patients are still forced to accept them.

A SOAP advocate says, “In the UK mental health system, if a patient rejects the psychiatric label, they are described as ‘lacking insight into their condition’ and the Mental Health Act is used to force them to take medication. How can a person be expected to agree to a label when they are changing every time the latest guide book comes out?”

The protest will give people the chance to voice their concerns about the DSM-5, and allow survivors of the psychiatric system to speak out about their experiences of labelling and forced treatment. SOAP will also be holding a memorial service for a former member who tragically took her own life following decades of forced medical treatment.

SOAP invites anybody who is concerned about the DSM-5, or other aspects of the mental health system, to come along on Tuesday 4th June – from 4.30pm till the early evening, at the Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park,London, SE5 8AF.

PDF press release available here: SOAP-DSM-5PressRelease

Maudsley Debates – Enabling or Labelling?

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This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.

Wednesday 5th June, 6pm (refreshments served from 5.30pm)

To coincide with the publication of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), sometimes described as the “Bible” of American psychiatry, the Institute of Psychiatry is hosting a debate on the issue of psychiatric diagnosis.  Some argue that a rigorously  standardised system of classification of mental disorders forms an essential role in conceptualising a patient’s problem, in predicting what treatments are likely to be effective, and in conducting valid scientific research.  Others consider psychiatric diagnoses to be no more than labels, which lack scientific and predictive validity and serve only to stigmatise and objectify those who suffer from mental disorders.  These issues will be debated in the 48th Maudsley Debate on Wednesday 5 June at 6pm at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill.  The motion is “This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.”  

Speaking for the motion:

Prof Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association

Prof Anthony David, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

Speaking against the motion:

Dr Felicity Callard, Senior Lecturer in Social Science for Medical Humanities, Durham University and Chair of the Board, Mental Disability Advocacy Center

Dr Pat Bracken, Clinical Director of Mental Health in West Cork and author of “Post- Psychiatry: Mental Health in a Post-Modern World”.  

Chair:  Sir Simon Wessely, Professor of Psychological Medicine and Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

 Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry Main Building, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF

Contact: Hannah Baker

For further information please see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iop/news/debates/index.aspx