An estimated 8 million Americans will hear voices at some point during their adult lives (rates are higher in children).  For the past 30 years, innovative strategies have developed through the partnership of clinicians and voice-hearers in the Hearing Voices Network.  This training will provide an overview of the history, values and language of this internationally-recognized approach.  Participants will leave with concrete, trauma-informed and culturally competent strategies for supporting people to navigate the voice-hearing experience.  This workshop will provide demonstrations of Voice Mapping, Voice Dialogue and other techniques that acknowledge the context of voices and can create a greater sense of empowerment for voice hearers.

The Presenters:

Caroline first interfaced with psychiatry at the age of eight, and years later was able to find a path out of a world narrowly defined by diagnoses and medication compliance through roller derby and social activism. Since moving out of a staffed group home in 2009, she has worked tirelessly to create change in the mental health system. In her current roles as Director of Training for the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community and the national Hearing Voices Research and Development Project, she has supported the development of the Hearing Voices Network in every time zone of the United States and keynoted the 10th World Hearing Voices Congress in the Netherlands. Caroline co-founded the world’s first Online Hearing Voices meeting and one of the first long-term forensic hospital groups in the United States. Her work with HVN has been featured in the New York Times and Foreign Policy magazine. She is passionate about re-claiming cultural and spiritual wisdom traditions for navigating extreme states and is both a certified Spiritual Emergence Coach and studying to become a rabbi.

Sera Davidow is a mother, an advocate, an activist and a film lover and maker. She devotes much of her time to the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community (www.westernmassrlc.org), which includes Afiya (www.afiyahouse.org), the 13th Peer Respite in the United States.  She is also an avid writer and regular blogger on Mad in America (www.MadinAmerica.com).  

Sera herself entered the mental health system as a teenager and cites ‘non-compliance’ as a part of what saved her from a very different path through life that surely would not have included the freedom she now enjoys from all psychiatric labels and medications.  Her passion for the Hearing Voices Movement has grown out of that experience in that its very foundation is steeped in making room for many different beliefs, experiences and approaches to healing and moving forward.