Intervoice - The international community for hearing voices. We have found there are many people who hear voices, yet are not troubled by them or have found their own ways of coping with them outside of psychiatric care. This is very significant as it shows you can hear voices and remain healthy. However, there are also significant numbers of voice hearers who are overwhelmed by the negative and disempowering aspects of the experience. Many are diagnosed as having a serious mental health problem such as schizophrenia – a harmful and stigmatizing concept, in our eyes. The experience of hearing voices prevents some people from living a fulfilled life in society (especially those in psychiatric and social care) and can lead to having a very poor quality of life. We seek to enable voice hearers troubled by their experience to change their relationship and attitude to their voices and to take up their lives again. We also want to ensure that our innovatory approach is better known by professionals, family members and friends. We have spent the last 20 years trying to better understand why some people can cope with the experience and others can’t. We have discovered that those people who are not able to cope with their voices, on the whole have not been able to cope with the traumatic events that lay at the roots of their voice hearing experience. Many voices can be unthreatening and even positive. “It’s wrong to turn this into a shameful problem that people either feel they have to deny or to take medication to suppress.” - Professor Marius Romme (read less)

Intervoice - The international community for hearing voices. We have found there are many people who hear voices, yet are not troubled by them or have found their own ways of coping with them outside of psychiatric care. This is very significant as it shows you can hear voices and remain healthy. However, there are also significant numbers of voice hearers who are overwhelmed by the negative and disempowering aspects of the experience. Many are diagnosed as having a serious mental health... (read more)