Hearing Voices

Is “schizophrenia” a broken brain — or shamanic journeying to ancestral dimensions? Is being “out of touch with reality” actually visions of deeper truth and racial healing? Dick Russell – author of 17 books including on the JFK assassination and a biography of Jungian James Hillman – followed doctors’ advice when his son Franklin was diagnosed psychotic. But Franklin, who is of mixed race, only got worse — until Russell and Franklin’s mother Etta Russell-Scott joined West African traditional healer Malidoma Somé on a spiritual quest. Franklin’s creative flourishing helped repair the relationship between father and son, and with Franklin’s support, Russell wrote My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage between Schizophrenia and Shamanism to bring crucial lessons for all of us. (transcript here) (58 min version)
https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781629144870/my-mysterious-son/
https://dickrussell.substack.com/
https://dickrussell.org/
www.madinamerica.com/2014/12/mysterious-son/
malidoma.com/about/
https://dickrussell.substack.com/

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Will Hall’s June 2024 Grand Rounds talk at University of California San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences – where he was locked up as a young man! – titled “New Visions of Psychosis: Abolition as Clinical Best Practice.” Revenge is a dish best served cold. Video here: https://youtu.be/adYrzmJ2w50?si=nwAQBM2F6oYmbShe transcript here. 58 min version

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Does hearing God’s voice make you mentally ill? Will psychiatry help you cope with grief and rejection – or make things worse? After a distressing romantic breakup Alison Smith went to her college clinic for help – and was locked up, drugged, and labeled psychotic. Positive and mysterious voices – including visions of Jesus – suddenly turned dark and persecutory, and Alison was driven into psychiatry-induced madness. Co-hosts Will Hall and Jacks McNamara join Alison to discuss religious voices – and psychiatric violence to suppress them. Alison’s writing has appeared in Granta, Real Simple, and PBS’s Stories from the Stage, and her acclaimed memoir Name All the Animals was named a ten best books of the year by People magazine (yes, that People magazine). A coming of age story, Name All the Animals opens on the day Alison’s brother died in a car crash and explores themes of grief, faith and sexuality. Alison lives in Northampton, MA and is working on a new memoir about hearing voices. www.namealltheanimals.com Transcript 58 min version

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Jyl Ion hears voices, but she refuses to view these non-ordinary experiences as a sign of mental illness. Instead Jyl came off 16 years of multiple toxic medications, talks to her ancestor spirits and has reclaimed access to unsanctioned knowledge. She struggled through the aftermath of sexual violence and was bedridden for two years of illness withdrawing from psychiatric meds – and now emerges as a strong survivor. Today Jyl has turned her voice hearing and her traumatic past into gifts, and works professionally as a forensic medium helping law enforcement solve missing persons cases. Her new book of poetry is called Soft Out Spoken. 58 min version

https://jylanais.com/

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How is psychotherapy different when the therapist is also a survivor? What vital lessons must therapists learn from people who have experienced psychosis? If therapy is an imbalance of power between therapist and patient, how can therapists avoid the misuse of power and protect clients from harm? Olga Runciman, voice hearer, psychiatric nurse in locked wards, and survivor of a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, brings her experience with recovery to her work as a psychotherapist in private practice.

http://psycovery.com

https://www.madinamerica.com/author/orunciman/

How can seeing visions and hearing voices be transformed into a spiritual gift for healing? What does the initiation ordeal into becoming a shaman involve? Gogo Ekhaya Esima was diagnosed with psychosis and confined in psychiatric hospitals before she became an initiated Sangoma healer in the Zulu tradition of South Africa. Today she is a certified Peer Recovery Specialist in mental health, a trauma survivor, and a spiritual teacher and was recently featured in the film Crazywise.

www.sangomahealing.com

What is it like to hear voices — and are all voices harmful or can they also be helpers? What does voice hearing say about the human mind – and the society we live in? And how can we support people who hear voices? Lisa Forestell has heard voices since she was a child. She is an organizer with the Hearing Voices Movement and with the Western Massachusetts Learning Community, a mutual support initiative run by and for people with lived experience of unusual and extreme states of mind labeled as “mental illness.” http://www.westernmassrlc.org/

Hearing Voices USA

What if you were the only one seeing coded messages, covert realities, and elaborate plots all around you? Does that make you out of touch with reality, “paranoid” and “psychotic?” Or is it real — but you are just so upset that everyone thinks the problem is you instead?

Tim Dreby, a psychotherapist and author in the San Francisco Bay Area, endured a life-threatening — and real — encounter with gangsters, police, and political conspiracy. He also survived a schizophrenia diagnosis, and today leads support groups for people facing overwhelming intuitions, coded messages, and conspiracies, helping them heal from trauma and regain control of their lives. fightingforfreedominamerica.wordpress.com outskirtspress.com/fightingforfreedominamerica https://www.facebook.com/Clyde-Dee-455156071353094/ http://amzn.to/1LIJrng

How do we recover from childhood violence? When Lauren Spiro was 14, her father was murdered. Eighteen months later, she began to have unusual spiritual experiences and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Today she works to promote peace and healing in communities, fulfilling the vision she had in her extreme state.

Lauren is co-director of Emotional CPR, associate director of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, and her new memoir is Living For Two: A Daughter’s Journey from Grief and Madness to Forgiveness and Peace.

http://laurenspiro.wordpress.com
www.ncmhr.org
www.emotional-cpr.org

What if researchers collaborated with patients rather than treating them as “informants” and objects of study? Nev Jones survived her mother’s frightening extreme states — and then her own mind unravelled into different realities. She was herself diagnosed with schizophrenia, and began a lifelong exploration of the uniqueness of madness.

Today Nev is a post-doctorate fellow at Stanford University, founder of Chicago Hearing Voices and the Lived Experience Research Network, and part of the the movement to create alternatives to professional control of research on psychosis.

http://depaul.academia.edu/NevJones
http://www.chicagohearingvoices.org

How do psychiatric labels shape our perceptions of others – and ourselves? Are there better ways to understand emotional distress? Does the “peer movement” offer real alternatives — or present new problems? Sera Davidow, psychiatric survivor, director of the peer-run Western Mass Recovery Learning Community (RLC), and co-producer of the new film “Beyond the Medical Model,” discusses the politics of language and innovative programs to truly help people in distress.

http://www.westernmassrlc.org
http://www.madinamerica.com/author/sdavidow/

Hearing voices is strongly connected with traumatic experiences, but are voices a brain malfunction or a creative strategy for protection?

UK psychologist Eleanor Longden survived a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and went on to be a leading researcher around voice hearing, trauma, and dissociation. She is a pioneer in the movement to understand voices as a normal human experience — and truly help people by healing trauma.

http://ind.pn/3ltxoe
http://bit.ly/NjDA77
http://bit.ly/z01Fhn

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Seamstress Agnes Richter was locked away in a mental asylum in the 1890s, and was so determined to have a voice that she embroidered her personal story onto the jacket she wore on the ward. What is the hidden history of people writing their own narratives of going insane? How important is it to listen to the experiences of “mentally ill” people? Is there meaning in madness?

Gail Hornstein, Mt. Holyoke College professor and author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, discusses the work of the Hearing Voices Movement in the UK, peer run support communities including Freedom Center in the US, and why professionals should let patients speak for themselves.

http://www.gailhornstein.com
http://bit.ly/aG9bnS

People who hear voices are no more violent than anyone else — but what about the small number of voice hearers that do actually commit violent crimes? Are medications and locked wards the best way to help those who act on their aggressive “command hallucinations?” What is the relationship between trauma, violence, and voices?

Dutch psychiatric social worker and Hearing Voices Movement member Erica van den Akker discusses her innovative counseling work with violent offenders in the Netherlands.

alpouvar1(at)tomaatnet(dot)nl

Can a severe, chronic case of “schizophrenia” ever recover? Is psychotherapy an alternative to medications? What role does trauma play in madness?

Hear the inspiring story of how Catherine Penney, RN, was catatonic and locked in a hospital back ward for years, and then emerged to create a new alternative healing community.

http://www.dantescure.com
http://www.desertgathering.com
http://www.iraresoul.com/dvd.html