Last year I attended a course to enable me to facilitate Hearing Voices Groups (HVG), which was organised by the Catherine McAuley School of Nursing and Midwifery in University College Cork and the Critical Voices Network Ireland. This course was facilitated by Jacqui Dillon, head of the Hearing Voices Network UK (HVN UK), who is a voice hearer herself. The training’s aim was to enable those who attended to facilitate HVGs in Ireland.

Ms Dillon also delivered a keynote presentation at last November’s UCC conference of the Critical Voice Network Ireland. She gave a very powerful account of her experience and how she learned to cope with it. She still hears voices and says she now would not like to be without them. She learned to change her attitude towards them, learned to treat them with more curiosity, empathy and friendliness. Through dialogue with her voices, her negative voices became less hostile: changing her attitude to them transformed her voices from being tormentors to becoming guides and guardians. She learned to draw links between what the voices were saying, her adverse life experience, and her past and present feelings. She now values her voices as a creative, resourceful and appropriate response to severely traumatic life experiences.

In the late 1980s, Prof. Marius Romme (Professor of Social Psychiatry) and Dr. Sandra Escher (science journalist), both from the Netherlands, researched what helped people cope with their voices. Their study showed that the problem is often not the actual hearing of voices, but the person’s difficulty or inability to cope with them. They found that voice hearing is a rather common phenomenon, and that a lot of voice hearers cope well with this experience without ever using the mental health system. Romme and Escher’s research showed that at least seventy percent of voice hearers have had some traumatic event which they connect with their voices. The research illustrated that accepting one’s experience of hearing voices, communicating about this experience, having a personal explanation for the voices, and setting the voices some limits enabled voice hearers to cope better.

Romme and Escher developed ways of working with people’s voices, and did so in cooperation with voice-hearers. Romme and Escher’s approach places the person’s potentially distressing experience into centre stage. They believe that we miss the point if we just treat them as hallucinations, something that does not exist. They suggest looking beyond diagnosis and labels and that we need to validate the voices as a real influence. One’s voices can be uncomfortable, but they can hold wisdom, which can be discovered if we explore the voices and show interest in the underlying problems. This approach normalises the experience of hearing voices and helps the voice hearer become more confident in talking about their experience and in trusting that what the voices say has meaning and that it is linked to the voice hearer’s life experience, albeit often contained and communicated in metaphors. The voice hearer can experience feeling empowered by learning to own, respect and manage their experience.

Following Romme and Escher’s ground-breaking research, the Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) was founded and the first HVG were established in the UK. There are now one hundred and eighty-eight HVGs in the UK. These advocate for a radical shift in the way we understand the phenomenon of hearing voices: instead of seeing hearing voices as a sign of mental illness, we need to recognise the experience as a sign of there being underlying problems, often linked to adverse life events – and it is these problems that we need to address.

The HVM’s innovative approach of working with people who hear voices is truly inspiring, hopeful and reassuring and it reaffirms my trust in distress being meaningful. It is in a way a very simple, down- to-earth, logical approach, which places emphasis on narrative, metaphor, and on sense-making between voices, feelings, and life experience. Most importantly, it acknowledges that voice-hearing can be a significant, creative attempt to survive and cope with adverse and traumatic life experiences.