Hearing Voices Implementaiton - 2 x 45 minute sessions
- Veteran Voices and Visions: Adapting the Hearing Voices Approach to an Urban VA Healthcare System - Ippolytos Kalofonos MD PhD MPH, Erica Hua Fletcher, PhD, Carol Jahchan, PhD, Sahastri Hercules, Cindy Hadge
- Online Hearing Voices Groups in the NHS: A Feasibility Study - Alison Branitsky, Mres
Veteran Voices and Visions: Adapting the Hearing Voices Approach to an Urban VA Healthcare System - Ippolytos Kalofonos MD PhD MPH, Erica Hua Fletcher, PhD, Carol Jahchan, PhD, Sahastri Hercules, Cindy Hadge, Tim LapradeThe Veteran Voices and Visions (VVV) project is an adaptation of the Hearing Voices approach to the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System that serves 1.4 million Veterans. The VA has officially adopted the recovery model and employs over 1400 peer specialists nationwide. The VVV project uses virtual support groups, co-facilitated by a clinician and a Veteran peer who is an “expert-by-experience,” to normalize experiences such as hearing voices and seeing visions. We are trying to build an evidence-base to get this approach recognized and available for use across the VA. Thus, VVV includes a research component to 1) study the adaptation of a Hearing Voices Facilitator training to the VA and 2) to understand how participating in VVV groups may help Veterans live with their voices and make meaning from their experiences. Our approach has involved multidisciplinary collaborations - including perspectives and contributions from Veterans who hear voices, Veteran peer support specialists, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social researchers, and national Hearing Voices leaders. Group members explore personal understandings and contexts of so-called “unusual” experiences commonly diagnosed as psychosis rather than privileging biomedical framings; we also encourage and support Veterans in engaging with their experiences as potentially meaningful rather than only interpreting them as symptoms of an illness to be eliminated. In VVV groups, Veterans share their stories, coping strategies, and worldviews, and often end up supporting each other in their ongoing life projects.
This panel brings together some of the participants of the project to share our perspectives and experiences, including researchers, clinicians, Veteran participants and facilitators, and trainers. We will explore some of the successes, challenges, lessons learned, possibilities, and contradictions of bringing this community-based, peer-driven approach into a large, bureaucratic health system.
Online Hearing Voices Groups in the NHS: A Feasibility Study - Alison Branitsky, MresOver the past 40 years, Hearing Voices Network Peer Support Groups (HVGs) have proliferated across the globe. HVGs are built on the ethos of self-determination and collective liberation, positing that voice hearing is a normal human experience and that individuals who hear voices are best positioned to determine how to understand and respond to their experiences. While HVGs exist widely in the community, they are also being run within statutory services, whose ethos are at times at odds with those of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). This presentation will explore both preliminary findings and personal experiences of running the first feasibility trial of online HVGs within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The presentations will cover how the group was adapted to run in the NHS while maintaining the values of HVN; qualitative and quantitative outcomes of group participation; challenges and opportunities arising from the online medium; the practical and philosophical possibilities and contradictions that arise from implementing survivor-led initiatives into public healthcare systems; and considerations for implementing these groups in a US-context.
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