Book Launch: Voices in Psychosis

This free event will include a panel discussion featuring

• Rai Waddingham (voice-hearer, researcher and Chair of the English Hearing Voices Network),
• Vaughan Bell (University College London, South London and Maudsley NHS Trust)
• Felicity Callard (University of Glasgow).

Wine and nibbles will be provided.

For more information about the venue, visit Oriental Museum.

About Voices in Psychosis

Voice-hearing experiences associated with psychosis are highly varied, frequently distressing, poorly understood, and deeply stigmatised, even within mental health settings. Voices in Psychosis responds to the urgent need for new ways of listening to and making sense of these experiences. It brings multiple disciplinary, clinical, and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who hear voices and who have accessed Early Intervention in Psychosis services.

The edited collection addresses the social, clinical, and research contexts in which the interviews took place, thoroughly investigating the embodied, multisensory, affective, linguistic, spatial, and relational qualities of voice-hearing experiences. The nature, politics, and consequences of these analytic endeavours is a focus of critical reflection throughout. Each chapter gives a multifaceted insight into the experiences of voice-hearers in the North East of England and to their wider resonance in contexts ranging from medieval mysticism to Amazonian shamanism, from the nineteenth-century novel to the twenty-first century survivor movement.

By deepening and extending our understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way, Voices in Psychosis will be an invaluable resource not only for academics in the field, but for mental health practitioners and members of the voice-hearing community.

Voices in Psychosis is available to read freely online here.