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

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

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

Feeling Emotional | Susie Orbach in Conversation with Jacqui Dillon at Wellcome Collection

Psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach in conversation with writer, campaigner, international speaker and trainer Jacqui Dillon, Chair of the Hearing Voices Network.

This talk was recorded at Wellcome Collection at our Feeling Emotional Friday Late Spectacular on Friday 5 February 2016.

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Photo Copyright Grace Gelder

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

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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

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

Keynote Talk on Demedicalising Distress in Powys, September 2013

Watch my recent talk on Demedicalising Distress in Powys on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/JHzHliy5yeQ

The Powys Mental Health team invites you to a free conference they are organising in in Llandrindod Wells.

Shaping Services Together.

  • Should the question underpinning how we shape our mental health services be “what has happened to you” rather than “what is wrong with you”?  Main Speaker Jacqui Dillon.
  • Do you use or have you ever used mental health services or are you close  to someone who has?  Do you think that your experiences of mental  health services could help change how services are planned and  delivered?
  • Do you want to know how you, no matter what your age, might become more involved in shaping our mental health services nationally and locally?
  • Key decision makers coming. Do you have something to say about the welfare benefit system and the changes?

Everyone welcome, all you need is you to be interested in the questions above. We can provide free transport to you if you live in Powys.

Lunch and refreshments will be available.

Thursday, 19th September 2013, 10:15 a.m – 4:00 p.m. The Pavilion, Spa Road, Llandrindod Wells, Powys LD1 5EY

To Book or find out more call Glynis Luke on 01597 822 191 or email her at pamhinfo@pavo.org.uk or book online here This is your opportunity to debate and communicate directly with national and local decision makers about mental health services.

Our keynote speaker is Jacqui Dillon, writer, campaigner, international speaker and trainer.

English poster here and leaflet here.  Welsh poster here and leaflet here

This is one of three conferences across Wales funded and supported by Welsh Government and Public HealtH Wales.  The other two are:

  • Thurs 12th September in Rhyl called Measuring Up.  More here.
  • Wed 23rd October in Cardiff called Know Your Rights.  More here.

These events are part of the Stronger in Partnership initiative, you can find out more about Powys Stronger in Partnership here.

You can download some information about the event here and there is more on our blog here.

Booking for the event is now open – click here.

 

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