About INTERVOICE
Page last updated 07/03/2008
Welcome to
The International Network for
Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices
Introduction:
Our beginnings:
Our aims:
Our values:
We have found there are many people who hear voices, yet are not troubled by them or have found their own ways of coping with them outside of psychiatric care. This is very significant as it shows you can hear voices and remain healthy.
However, there are also significant numbers of voice hearers who are overwhelmed by the negative and disempowering aspects of the experience. Many are diagnosed as having a serious mental health problem such as schizophrenia – a harmful and stigmatizing concept, in our eyes.
The experience of hearing voices prevents some people from living a fulfilled life in society (especially those in psychiatric and social care) and can lead to having a very poor quality of life. We seek to enable voice hearers troubled by their experience to change their relationship and attitude to their voices and to take up their lives again. We also want to ensure that our innovatory approach is better known by professionals, family members and friends.
We have spent the last 20 years trying to better understand why some people can cope with the experience and others can’t. We have discovered that those people who are not able to cope with their voices, on the whole have not been able to cope with the traumatic events that lay at the roots of their voice hearing experience.
Significantly, the search for ways of doing this began with the people who were best able to provide the answers, the voice hearers themselves including psychiatric patients, and equally importantly, people who heard voices who had never needed to seek the assistance of psychiatric services.
Our network focuses on solutions that improve the life of voice hearers in the knowledge that these methods have been co-developed by voice hearers and professionals.
The most important factor in the success of our approach is the importance placed on the personal engagement of the people involved. This means that everybody is considered an expert of their own experiences. We see each other first as people, secondly as equal partners and thirdly as all having different but mutually valuable expertise to offer This can either be through direct experience of hearing voices or having worked with voice hearers (and/or wanting to).
We now know, because we have met a lot of voice hearers who have recovered from the stress caused by their voices, to be sure that understanding the meaning of the voices is of great significance. It is important, therefore, that we promote this information in a more systematic way to ensure that our message is clear and coherent.
One outcome of this is the development of this online community.
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In August 1997 a meeting of voice hearers and mental health workers was held in Maastricht to discuss developing the further promotion and research into the issue of voice hearing. We came to the conclusion that to continue to make progress it would be necessary to establish a formal organisational structure to provide administrative and co-ordinating support to the wide variety of initiatives in the different involved countries. The new network was called INTERVOICE (The International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing voices)
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INTERVOICE aims to
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The network therefore focuses on facilitating relevant assistance and solutions that improve the life of voice hearers in the knowledge that these methods have been co-developed by voice hearers and professionals.
It is most important to us that the network embodies these guiding principles and is structured in such a way that it safeguards and develops them amongst founding and future members.
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What do you think? if you have a point of view that you would like to express about this article, fill in the form below and submit.
Thank you for your interest, we hope you found the website useful.
In answer to your questions:
Firstly, INTERVOICE is not explicitly anti-psychiatry. Perhaps you will have noticed that our president, Professor Marius Romme is a psychiatrist and if you visit the Peoples section at http://www.intervoiceonline.org/2007/6/11/people-involved-in-the-hearing-voices-movement you will see that INTERVOICE is supported by mental health professionals including nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists. We believe the most important factor in the success of our approach is the importance placed on the personal engagement of the people involved. This means that everybody is considered an expert of their own experiences. We see each other first as people, secondly as equal partners and thirdly as all having different but mutually valuable expertise to offer. This can either be through direct experience of hearing voices or having worked with voice hearers (and/or wanting to). There is an interesting, more neutral description of the Hearing voices Movement at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement you may find useful.
It is fair to say though, that INTERVOICE is critical of psychiatry in relation to the way the profession generally understands and treats people who hear voices and that our research has also led us to hold the postion that the schizophrenia is an unscientific and unhelpful hypothesis which we believe should be abandoned. You can see our position on these issues at http://www.intervoiceonline.org/2006/11/28/hearing-voices-and-schizophrenia and http://www.intervoiceonline.org/2007/6/29/recovering-from-voices-by-changing-your-relationship-with-them. If anything, we regard ourselves as being a post-psychiatric organisation, positioning ourselves outside of the mental health world in recognition that voices, in our view, are an aspect of human differentness, rather than a mental health problem and that as with homosexuality (also regarded by psychiatry in recent times as an illness), the main issue is about human rights and changing the way society perceives the expereince, if we do this we believe psychiatry will follow. However, we are also attempting in the way we work to find more holisitic solutions to voices that cause mental distress then the generally reductionist, disease based model offered by mainstream psychiatry. As you can see from the site, baesed on our research we hold the opinion that many people successfully live with their voices and that in themselves voices are not the problem. For this reason we are prepared to accept a range of explanations offered by people who hear voices including spiritual ones and that recovery from overwhelming voices can be acheived by seeking to understand the meaning of the voices to the voice hearer.
Secondly, INTERVOICE is run by volunteers and most of the support we receive is in kind, to date we have received a total of two donations from an individual supporter, one of which funded the development of the site and the second is to help develop the hearing voices movement in the developing world, together these donations ammount to 7,500 pounds. Our annual meetings are funded by the national host, last year this was in Denmark, (who pay for delegates accomodation and for the cost of the meeting itself, whilst delegates meet their own travel and subsistance costs). We have recently established INTERVOICE as a not for profit company in the UK and our ambition is to become a registered charity in the next year or so.
Meanwhile, most of the national members, such as the National Hearing Voices Network based in Manchester, are funded by the NHS and by sources such as the National Lottery Fund, mant of individual local hearing voices groups are supported by NHS Trusts and by organisations like Mind. This is also the case in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and also for all our European partners.
I hope that covers your questions, if you have any further ones please let me know.
Best wishes
Paul Baker
INTERVOICE