Press | Jacqui Dillon

Mental Health Campaigners Welcome New Book About Schizophrenia

07/07/2011/0 Comments/in Press /by Jacqui

Published in The Guardian, 5th July 2011.

Mental health campaigners welcome book about schizophrenia.

The letters, journals and scribbled observations of David, diagnosed with schizophrenia, have been collated for a new book.

By Mary O’Hara

Schizophrenia is perhaps the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented of all serious mental illnesses in popular culture and media. So, when first-person accounts offering insights into the experience of someone who has lived with schizophrenia come along, they tend to be welcomed by mental health campaigners as an antidote to misinformation. Such has been the case with David’s Box, a new book documenting the journals and letters of a young man diagnosed with the illness in 1964 who took his own life seven years later.

Voices In Your Head? You May Not Be Crazy

19/03/2011/0 Comments/in Press /by Rai

Published in: The Times, 27 January 2007, By Michelle Kirsch

We have all had the experience of seeing a person walking down the road, talking loudly to what appears to be him or herself. Before the advent of hands-free mobile phones, which gives the scene a “sane” context, we would have thought the person disturbed, speaking to someone who does not exist outside his own head. Now psychologists studying the phenomenon of hearing voices are asking us to consider two other possibilities: one is that people who hear voices may not be disturbed by them, and the other is that a person who appears to be speaking on a mobile phone might be speaking to one of his voices.

Pretending to speak on a mobile phone is just one strategy that makes life more bearable for the estimated 4 per cent of Britons who hear voices. The 4 per cent figure, as cited by the Hearing Voices Network, an educational and self-help registered charity for voice-hearers, is a conservative estimate. The real figure may be much higher, they say, because anyone who admits to hearing voices may be subjected to close, perhaps unwelcome, psychiatric scrutiny

How I Tamed the Voices in my Head

19/03/2011/2 Comments/in Press /by Rai

Published in: The Independent, 6 March, 2007, By Kate Hilpburn

Eleanor Longden, 25, started hearing voices when she was a teenager. But, contrary to the usual perception of inner voices, Longden says hers weren’t destructive: “It was rather mundane, simply giving me a narration of some of the day-to-day things I was doing. In many ways, the voice was companionate because it was reminding me that I was carrying on with my responsibilities despite feeling so sad inside. There was something constructive about it.”

People like Longden who admit to hearing inner voices can generally expect two outcomes: a diagnosis of insanity, and potent medication. But a group of psychiatrists and psychologists believe it’s time we reconsidered labels such as schizophrenia and the drugs used as treatment. In fact, they believe we should get people to listen to, and actually engage with, the voices inside their heads.

In Your Head: Hearing Voices

19/03/2011/0 Comments/in Press /by Rai

Published in: Psychology Today, January 1, 2007, by William Lee Adams

Despite their association with mental illness, auditory hallucinations don’t always torment those who hear them. In fact, only one out of every three so-called “voice hearers” requires psychiatric help. The other two don’t experience difficulties and may even consider their voices supportive or inspiring.

“My voices know me better than anyone else, and they also protect and comfort me,” says Jacqui Dillon, head of a London support group for voice hearers. She and other group members report that voices can alert them to oncoming cars and suspicious passersby, provide encouragement during stressful times, and offer reminders to pick things up at the grocery store.

Whether they threaten or soothe, auditory hallucinations usually begin after trauma: Seventy percent of people who hear voices first detect them following physical or sexual abuse, an accident, or the loss of a loved one. “The emotion they feel about their trauma complicates how they interpret the voices,” says Sara Tai, a psychologist at the University of Manchester in England who studies why some hallucinators thrive while others end up in psychiatric care. Typically, the greater the trauma, the more likely voices will sound threatening.

Experts call for ban on schizophrenia ‘label’

19/03/2011/0 Comments/in Press /by Rai

Published in: Daily Mail, 9 October, 2006

Schizophrenia should be abolished as a concept because it is unscientific, stigmatising, and does not address the root causes of serious mental illness, a group of experts said today.

The diagnosis, which emerged in the 19th century, is flawed and harmful, they claimed. It not only grouped together patients with widely ranging symptoms, but offered no explanation for their illnesses.

Once given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a person was labelled an incurable social misfit and placed at the mercy of a psychiatric system that mostly benefited the drug industry.

A new campaign called CASL (Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenic Label) is said to be gaining increasing support from both patients groups and professionals.

It wants patients to be assessed according to their individual experiences and histories rather than blanket-categorised as “schizophrenic”.

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