Hearing Voices Network

If you're listening to this and you're trauma-informed, but you're not spiritual emergency-informed, The international and then the domestic version of Spiritual Emergency Network does training for therapists on how to support people in spiritual emergencies, as well as Emma Bragdon's Integrative Mental Health Institute, sorry, Integrative Mental Health University, IMHU.

And then the Hearing Voices Network there's a lot of overlap.

So check out them and they have an annual conference.

So please go support them and get educated.

And these people told their stories in the ways that made sense to them, not in the ways that a pre-structured set of interview questions might have done.

And through these interviews in the testimony project, I learned about the Hearing Voices Network, That was in 2003.

I was on a sabbatical in England, and I first made contact with people in the Hearing Voices world who, like Agnes Richter, were today, at that time and in the present, involved in an effort to take their own experience and to use it to create a larger understanding of what was going on.

in the mind when, for example, people hear voices.

These are clinical innovations that might not have the massive multi-decade randomized controlled trials yet, but they are showing incredible promise and, quite frankly, challenging the core assumptions of the field.

The first one is the Hearing Voices Network.

The Hearing Voices Network, or HVN, represents a fascinating paradigm shift.

Traditionally, if a patient reports hearing voices, the immediate clinical reflex is to eradicate them with medication.

HVN operates on a completely different philosophical pillar.

Okay, I have to push back here.

As a physician, if a patient tells me they are hearing a demonic voice commanding them to jump out a window or hurt someone else, my oath says do no harm? Telling them to negotiate with that demon sounds reckless, maybe even malpractice.

How does the Hearing Voices Network justify the risk of not immediately suppressing a dangerous hallucination?

So I went to a couple of Hearing Voices sessions, actually.

There are meetings that take place sort of internationally, the Hearing Voices Network.

And it was just fascinating to... meet such an eclectic diverse mix of of people um so I went with a family member who also hears voices I have a couple of people three or three people in my family actually four people in my family extended family who are voice voice hearers and um I went with one family member to one of the meetings and there was a woman there who isn't on any medication.

Her main voice is a positive voice.

And I made sure that the voice hearers in my life, they were some of my biggest, you know, first readers.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like I said, I went to the Hearing Voices Network.

I did a lot of research online.