Voices in the dark: Mosaic Science Podcast

Taken from the Mosaic Science Podcast podcast site: https://mosaicscience.com/story/hearing-voices

This documentary is also available on the Mosaic podcast through iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and wherever good podcasts are found.

We all have an inner voice. But for some, hearing voices can be much more distinct and unusual.

Adam has a voice with a unique name and identity. Jacqui hears hundreds of different voices. Dolly’s voices led her to believe she was Jesus. The voices John experienced drove him to the edge.

Voice hearing is often understood to be a symptom of mental illness, but many voice hearers refute this diagnosis, believing the voices they hear are based on significant events that have shaped their lives.

Through their stories we explore what it means to hear voices and discover how the phenomenon is being understood, from medieval tales of demonic visions to childhood language cognition, a Dutch psychiatrist helping voice hearers find meaning in their voices, and a pioneering ‘avatar’ therapy using computer technology.

Sanity, Madness and the Family

Sanity, Madness and the Family – Audio Clip

If you’d like to hear my talk at this event, check out: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2015/04/sanity-madness-and-the-family-family-life-an-urgent-retrospective/

Details on the event:

Sanity, Madness and the FamilyIt is just over 50 years since the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Family, R.D. Laing’s and Aaron Esterson’s groundbreaking study of ‘schizophrenia’ in 11 young women. Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC) and the Birkbeck Guilt Working Group have organized a one-day symposium to discuss the lasting impact of that book.

Do people still read it? Why is it almost never referred to in psychotherapy trainings in this country? How have the ideas it introduced been either absorbed into or rejected by clinical, academic and more general discourses about the family and mental/emotional illness?

Andrew Asibong, co-director of BRAKC, will facilitate the event, and participants will include Jacqui Dillon, Robbie Duschinsky, Suman Fernando, Amber Jacobs, Oliver James, Lucy Johnstone, Chris Oakley, Lynne Segal and Anthony Stadlen.

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

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

Treatment Gap: The Truth about Mental Health

If you habbc_world_serviceve a mental health problem, where you live in the world makes a big  difference to the care you receive. In many lower and middle income countries,  three-quarters of people with mental health problems don’t have access to  mainstream mental health services. Even in wealthier, developed countries, the figure is close to 50%.

Claudia Hammond investigates some of the alternatives that occupy this ‘treatment gap’.

Psychiatrist Dr Monique Mutheru is one of just 25 psychiatrists in Kenya. In the absence of services to  meet the mental health needs of Kenyans, traditional healers and witchdoctors  play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating them. Claudia examines a programme which brings health workers and traditional healers together. It provides training for traditional healers to refer their severely ill patients to the clinic and avoid harmful practices that some healers carry out, such as lobotomy and bloodletting.

Even in developed countries like the United Kingdom, where mental health services are freely available, some people with mental health problems feel that the treatments do not help. The Hearing Voices Network provides support to ‘voice hearers’, through support groups, helping them to manage and engage with the voices that trouble them.

You can listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b35lq

Radio New Zealand (2010)

Interviewed by: Kathryn Ryan, 14 April 2010 on the Nine till Noon show

Radio New Zealand Jacqui

Jacqui Dillon is a guest speaker at a conference in Wellington this week and in Auckland next week at the Making Sense of Psychosis conference, held by Auckland University and organized jointly by the NZ branch of the International Society for the Psychological Treatments of Schizophrenia and the NZ Hearing Voices Network. (duration: 17′23″)

See: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20100414

Madness Radio (June 16, 2009)

What is it like to hear voices? How do people learn to live with their voices, and are voices sometimes positive and helpful? What is the connection between voices and trauma? Jacqui Dillon, voice hearer and director of the UK Hearing Voices Network, discusses how the movement of people who hear voices is creating self-help alternatives to traditional and often abusive mental health care.

Listen: http://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-hearing-voices-movement-jacqui-dillon