Back in 2018, Hearing the Voice (HtV) launched a new website, Understanding Voices (UV), to help support people who hear voices and their loved ones. We are hoping to support them on designing an app for young people who hear voices…for more information about how you can support this and join our focus groups click the link here: https://hearingthevoice.org/2021/10/19/living-with-voices-should-we-make-an-app-for-young-people-who-hear-voices/
Voice Collective are collaborating with Manchester Metropolitan University on a Special Interest Research Group funded by Emerging Minds. We will be looking at treatment and support options for children who hear voices, see visions and have other sensory experiences and beliefs. We held a Webinar on Friday 26th February where an artist put together all of your ideas into this amazing piece of artwork! Thank you to everyone who came and we look forward to keeping you updated with this group!
We teamed up with the Charles Dickens Museum back in October 2020 half term to hold the ‘My Technicolour Self’ workshop! About ten young people signed up for the three day event and were supported by the museum team and an artist to create colourful self-portraits using paint, pastel, collage, coloured pencils or ink. Lots of great portraits were created, representing young peoples inner self or anything else that represented who they were. Please watch this space for some sharing of the portraits very soon!
Latest News from our manager Eve…
It’s been an exciting and inspiring couple of weeks here at Voice Collective. HVN USA, the USA’s national hearing voices network, invited me to deliver two workshops at the 9th World Hearing Voices Congress, which they hosted in Boston, MA, across the 16th – 18th August.
The theme for this year’s Congress was A Revolution of Unseen Voices, creating a platform for the voices, stories and communities that have seldom been heard within traditional psychiatry and psychology. Keynote speakers included Sangoma Traditional Healer Gogo Ekhaya Esima, who spoke passionately about trauma and spiritual growth, ‘Liberation Psychologist’ David Walker, who charted the history of the oppression of the Yakama Nation in Washington, and Mind in Camden’s Akiko Hart, who spoke of our work together supporting voice hearers in prisons, forensic secure units and Immigration Removal Centres.
We were delighted to win an Innovation award from Intervoice, the International Hearing Voices Network, for our work supporting people in detention (including young offenders), and one of the young people who we’ve worked closely with over the years at Voice Collective, the brilliant Nikki Mattocks, received a Special Mention in the Inspiring Person category. An enormous well done to Nikki for all her stellar campaigning and peer support work!
More than 70 people attended the two Voice Collective workshops – “Somewhere Where I Can Be Me”: Creating & sustaining safe spaces for children & young people who hear distressing voices, and Death By A Thousand Cuts? Rethinking self-harming by children & young people who hear voices. There was some fantastic discussion about the need for peer support initiatives in other parts of the world, and what these might look like, as well as ways of reframing and responding differently to children and young people who hear voices and self-harm.
Over the next few months I’ll be following up with colleagues and friends across the States, Canada and Denmark, supporting them to develop their services for children and young people, within community and in-patient settings. We’ll also be using our learning from the Congress to develop extra resources for the website, so watch this space!
Nikki, a participant in our recent artistic collaboration with Wellcome Collection, courageously shared some of her own experiences of hearing voices that other people can’t on Sky News.
Talking out about voices and visions is no easy feat, but Nikki shows that it is possible to overcome difficult experiences and express them. We hope that seeing Nikki speak out gives other young people the courage they need to let others know that they’re struggling with voice and – if needed – access help.
To find out more about the ‘This is a Voice’ exhibition and project that Nikki took part in, see: https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/voice-hearing-project
To see the artwork and words of other young people who hear voices, see: http://www.voicecollective.co.uk/about-voices/young-peoples-art-gallery/
To read other young people’s stories, see: http://www.voicecollective.co.uk/about-voices/personal-stories/
Some experts think the problem is how doctors and society treat people who hear things, not the voices themselves.
Roc Morin in The Atlantic, 5 November 2014
“The first time that I heard this voice, I was very much frightened,” the prisoner testified. “When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the voice of an angel … The voice said to me: ‘Go into France!’ I could bear it no longer.”
Joan of Arc, who spoke these words before her execution in 1431, is just one of many notable voice-hearers cited in the literature of Intervoice, an advocacy organization for individuals living with auditory hallucinations. Continue reading “Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head”
In the run up to the 2011 BBC Children In Need appeal, Voice Collective was featured on BBC London News. ‘Ashley’ one of the young people who use our group and her mother share their experiences of voices, accessing Voice Collective and attending the group at Anna Freud Centre.
Rachel, the project manager, gives a brief overview of what we provide. One of the best parts of this is that Ashley had the opportunity to share how isolating it is for her to hear voices and how she just needs people to listen to her and believe her.
Watch online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15656353 Continue reading “Voice Collective on BBC London”
Nearly 1 in 10 seven- to eight-year-olds hears voices that aren’t really there, according to a new study
By Reuters Health, Monday 25th January, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/reutersvoices
But most children who hear voices don’t find them troubling or disruptive to their thinking, the study team found. “These voices in general have a limited impact in daily life,” Agna A. Bartels-Velthuis of University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands wrote in an email to Reuters Health.
And parents whose children hear voices should not be overly concerned, she added. “In most cases the voices will just disappear. I would advise them to reassure their child and to watch him or her closely.”
Up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens may hear voices, the researchers note in the British Journal of Psychiatry. While hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in later life, they add, the “great majority” of young people who have these experiences never become mentally ill. Continue reading “Many Children ‘Hear Voices’; Most Aren’t Bothered”
Eleanor Longden was a diagnosed schizophrenic and heard menacing voices in her head for 10 years. Now, she has fought back and has graduated with a brilliant honours degree in psychology.
By Nina Lakhani, The Independent, Sunday 25th October, 2009
Eleanor Longden was revising for her final university exams in May when she was interrupted by a hostile middle-aged man, who barked: Stop! You can’t do this; you’re going to fail. You’re not good enough to get a degree. Nine other people joined his tirade in a chorus of noisy abuse as Ms Longden, 27, tried to concentrate on studying.
You know what? she replied. You’re right: I do need to stop for a break. Thanks for reminding me.
Ms Longden has been hearing the same critical, often menacing, internal voices for about 10 years. Every day, the dominant male speaks to her in an authoritative tone. The others back him up and the messages are always the same: you Continue reading “A First Class Recovery: From hopeless case to graduate”
Hearing voices is a relatively common – and taboo – phenomenon in children and can trigger educational difficulties, but this could change with the publication of a groundbreaking study in Holland.
By David Batty, The Guardian, Friday 16 November, 2001
Harry squinted at his friends’ darkened faces.
“Do you think I should have told them about that voice I heard?”
“No,” said Ron, without hesitation. “Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world”.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
In the second of JK Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter series, the young wizard is tormented by a threatening voice that only he can hear: Come… come to me… let me rip you… let me tear you… let me kill you…
Upon confessing this to his best friends, Ron and Hermione, Harry is warned not to tell anyone else as it might inflame suspicion that he is responsible for the recent spate of attacks on their fellow pupils. Continue reading “Listening Cure”
