We train people and organisations in facilitating Hearing Voices and/or Unusual Beliefs groups, offer an additional programme of courses and workshops in the field of critical mental health and hold quarterly Network Meetings including a speaker presentation.
Together with its sister projects Voice Collective and Voices Unlocked, the London Hearing Voices Project has developed an excellent local, national and international reputation and is part of the wider international ‘Hearing Voices’ movement. We do partnership working with Universities, recently we have been collaborating with Durham University’s Hearing the Voice, to create an online resource Understanding Voices (www.understandingvoices.com).
Voice-hearing is a common human experience which can often be positive or neutral. But when voices are distressing, one of the most effective and empowering kinds of support is to meet in a group with other voice-hearers – where people can connect, share, explore ideas and sometimes sit with challenging emotions. The first meeting of this sort took place over thirty years ago in Holland and since then, across the world, Hearing Voices Groups have offered a safe space to countless numbers. For some the experience is life-changing, representing a turning point in their recovery.
In a Hearing Voices Group, meaning-making is encouraged, and we are interested in exploring people’s relationship with their voices. But we always value the person’s own understanding of their voices, this is paramount. Many do understand their voices/visions/alternative realities as resulting from individual trauma, but there is an almost infinite range of other routes to understanding, all of which we respect. For instance collective and intergenerational trauma; spiritual practice; religious belief; psychological explanations; drug use/withdrawal; telepathy; neurodiversity and more. Believing that voice-hearing derives from a brain chemical imbalance is a common story in psychiatry, perhaps the dominant one, but while some people find it harmful and lacking in scientific evidence, we also fully support those who find it helpful. Experience of voices is rarely a result of one thing, and possible causes overlap in very individual ways.
We use ‘voice-hearing’ as an imperfect umbrella term to include many different experiences, e.g. seeing things or sensing things that others don’t, or experiencing beliefs that others find unusual.
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