Mobile Phone apps for hearing Voices?

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There is an interesting article on Mobile phone and therapy by Michelle Trudeau here

Here is a small excerpt on Hearing voices from it

”

One of the most intractable mental illness afflicting one percent of the population is schizophrenia. It’s for these patients that University of Pennsylvania researcher Dimitri Perivoliotis is developing innovative mobile technologies.

Palm-sized computers that chart a patients moods and activities, for example. And a digital watch that has personalized scrolling messages. The messages on the watch, for example, can instruct the patient on stress reduction exercises, like deep breathing or muscle relaxation, in order “to reduce the stress triggered by their voices,” Perivoliotis says.

“One of our patients came in with chronic, constant auditory hallucinations (i.e.; hearing voices) that really controlled his life,” Perivoliotis recalls. “The voices would threaten him that if he would go outside and do fun things, then terrible, catastrophic things would happen to him. He felt really enslaved by them. He felt no sense of control whatsoever.”

So the therapist taught the patient a few simple behavioral exercises to reduce the severity of the voices. It’s an exercise called the ‘look, point, and name technique.’ Perivoliotis explains. “When a patient starts to hear voices, he applies the technique by looking at an object in the room, pointing to it, and naming it aloud. He repeats this until he runs out of things to name (e.g., “phone, computer, book, pen…”).

Perivoliotis reports “the technique usually results in reduced voice severity (i.e., the voices seem quieter or pause altogether), probably because the patient’s attention is redirected away from them and because speaking competes with a brain mechanism involved in auditory hallucinations.”

So the mobile therapy watch that this patient wore was programmed to remind him a few times a day to practice this technique to control the voices.

“It really did the trick,” Perivoliotis says. The voices were dramatically reduced. “It kind of broke him out of the stream of voices, and his internal preoccupation with them.”

Exercises like these not only give the patient temporary relief from distressing symptoms, but importantly, Perivoliotis adds, “They help to correct patients’ inaccurate and dysfunctional beliefs about their symptoms — from, ‘I have no control over the voices’ to, ‘I do have some control over them.'”

As a therapist treating patients with schizophrenia, Perivoliotis finds the mobile technologies extremely useful.

“It gives me an additional source of rich information of what the patient’s life is like between sessions,” he says. “It’s almost like an electronic therapist, in a way, or a therapist in your pocket.”

Fascinating.

Giving Voice to the Void

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I read the keynote speech from Karlo Mila-Schaaf that she presented at the Building Bridges Conference in Wellington.

An inspiring story it tells of some of her own experiences , her diagnosis with mental illness and her recovery.

She has kindly allowed us to place it on our website. You can read it by clicking  here.

Here is a little excerpt:

How do you explain why voices are talking to you from under the floor? How do you make sense of dreaming in ways so real that it does not feel like a dream, that you are being burned or hung in front of a large, maddened crowd, in Mala’ekula every night? (Mala’e kula is the Tongan royal burial ground).
How do you explain having the voices of your friends and enemies in your head, saying things louder and clearer than anything else around you? How do you make explain the fact that you can hear the pigs and farmyard animals around your house in Tonga talking to you in ways that you understand?
How do you explain people’s faces contorting and shape-shifting into other things? The Maori psychiatric nurse, for example, who shakes his head and he turns into a ruru, an owl, right in front of you? None of this makes any sense according to anything you have ever known or understood to be true. When you see your grandmother kneeling on a tapa, greeting the sun and you run out of your house to see her, forgetting that she is dead, and wondering, when you run outside and see no one, you’re wondering, what is happening to you?

My sister told me that someone she knew was hearing voices and she didn’t know how to deal with it, or her. What was the best way to react, she asked me. I said to her, “Don’t tell her the voices are not real”. It’s not helpful. It never helped me. The voices were there. I could hear them. Being told that I was delusional was not helpful. It just undermined the truth of my own experience. “Tell her that that sounds very frightening,” I said. “Tell her, that if that was you, you’d be freaked and frightened and that she is being very brave, dealing with this, because it must be impossibly frightening to deal with.” I said to her, “Affirm her bravery and courage and agency in what must be one of the most difficult and frightening experiences she has ever had to confront.”

You know, I can’t think of any worse response to facing this kind of incredibly frightening situation and then being at the height of this vulnerability, the most vulnerable and frightened you will ever be in your life, being slammed with a diagnosis that then cages you and captures you and pins you to the ground, saying thou shalt never move from this spot again, you will never recover from this, and you are now doomed with a diagnosis that you will never escape from, or recover from, go to jail, do not pass go, you will never be normal again.

Because this is what we do to people who experience psychosis, who see things they shouldn’t be seeing and hear things they shouldn’t be hearing. We give them some kind of schizo diagnosis, to separate them out from the rest of us, and we leave them on the other side of that bridge”

To read it in its entirety, please click on the link above.

David Rosenhans Experiment

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Wikipedia site states that David Ronsehan conducted this experiment in 1973, where he sent volunteers into Psychiatric hospitals , to prove that the diagnostic and treatment regime was no good. it says this

Rosenhan himself and eight mentally healthy associates, called “pseudopatients”, attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by calling for an appointment and feigning auditory hallucinations. The hospital staffs were not informed of the experiment. The pseudopatients were a psychology graduate student in his twenties, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife. None had a history of mental illness. Pseudopatients used pseudonyms, and those who worked in the mental health field were given false jobs in a different sector to avoid invoking any special treatment or scrutiny. Apart from giving false names and employment details, further biographical details were truthfully reported.

During their initial psychiatric assessment, they claimed to be hearing voices of the same sex as the patient which were often unclear, but which seemed to pronounce the words “empty”, “hollow”, “thud” and nothing else. These words were chosen as they vaguely suggest some sort of existential crisis and for the lack of any published literature referencing them aspsychotic symptoms. No other psychiatric symptoms were claimed. If admitted, the pseudopatients were instructed to “act normally,” report that they felt fine and no longer heard voices. Hospital records obtained after the experiment indicate that all pseudopatients were characterized as friendly and cooperative by staff.

All were admitted, to 12 different psychiatric hospitals across the United States, including rundown and underfunded public hospitals in rural areas, urban university-run hospitals with excellent reputations, and one expensive private hospital. Though presented with identical symptoms, 11 were diagnosed with schizophrenia at public hospitals, and one with manic-depressive psychosis, a more optimistic diagnosis with better clinical outcomes, at the private hospital. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, and the average was 19 days. All were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission,” which Rosenhan takes as evidence that mental illness is perceived as an irreversible condition creating a lifelong stigma rather than a curable illness.

Then in a twist when one hospital claimed that there is no way they would so such a thing, he did this:

The non-existent impostor experiment

For this experiment, Rosenhan used a well-known research and teaching hospital, whose staff had heard of the results of the initial study but claimed that similar errors could not be made at their institution. Rosenhan arranged with them that during a three month period, one or more pseudopatients would attempt to gain admission and the staff would rate every incoming patient as to the likelihood they were an impostor. Out of 193 patients, 41 were considered to be impostors and a further 42 were considered suspect. In reality, Rosenhan had sent no pseudopatients and all patients suspected as impostors by the hospital staff were genuine patients. This led to a conclusion that “any diagnostic process that lends itself too readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one”. Studies by others found similarly problematic diagnostic results.

He published the results in SCIENCE.

Here is an excerpt from the BBC Documentary THE TRAP, about it.

How Mad Are You? On Documentary Channel.

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I saw the advert for this briefly the other night. I am sure I caught a glimpse of Richard Bentall there?

It looks very interesting. Here is an excerpt for the program from the Documentary Channels website

‘In 1973, Dr David Rosenhan conducted a seminal experiment (Being Sane in Insane Places) in the USA, during which sane patients faked symptoms to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals and were diagnosed as such; some of them were kept in hospital for up to 52 days. He proved that psychiatry, the science of the mind, couldn’t tell the difference between sanity and insanity. It was an experiment which transformed how mental illness was diagnosed.

Based on some of the ideas behind that experiment, How Mad Are You has brought together 10 volunteers for five days to work through a new series of tasks, conducted by psychologist Professor Peter Kinderman. Five of the volunteers are normal, and five have a history of psychiatric disorders.

The question is simple: which is which?

During the five days, the volunteers are not allowed to discuss their histories as they live and work through the challenges together, facing stressful situations and confronting their fears. The tests are designed to explore the character traits of mental illness and ask whether the symptoms might be within all of us. They include performing stand-up comedy to mucking out cows.

Who will cope best? Will the individuals who have been affected by mental illness reveal themselves? Or will the ‘normal’ but shy volunteer exhibit the oddest behaviour of all?

Mental Illness affects 450 million people worldwide. It preys on all ages, all sexes and all cultures. The path to health can be long and difficult, but for many simply being called ‘mentally ill’ is a heavier burden to carry than the illness itself. Being labelled with a psychiatric disorder brings profound social stigma, leaving some people outcast all their lives.’

It is showing Tuesday 27th April at 8.30pm at Wednesday 28th April 2010 at 4.30pm and 12.30pm.

A friend told me about the experiment that was conducted back then. I will have to see if I can find more details about it and post it here.

Jacqui Dillon Interview on Radio New Zealand with Kathryn Ryan

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As many of you are already aware , the Hearing Voices Network Aotearoa NZ is lucky to have Jacqui Dillon in New Zealand at the moment.

Jacqui Dillon is the chairperson for the Hearing Voices Network in UK ( where they have well over 150 support groups.) She is here for the Building Bridges Conference in Wellington this week. Next week she will be in Auckland for the ISPS  Conference.

Jacqui was interviews on the Nine to Noon programme. A great interview. She talks candidly about her own experience- what it is like for her to hear voices. She stresses the importance of understanding voices, explaining how she has been able to change her distressing voices to become of help to her.

A campaigner also for the abolition of the Schizophrenia label, Jacqui talks of how there is no physical test that proves that Schizophrenia is a brain disease, a chemical imbalance, or a genetic disposition. It is a set of symptoms that have become medicalised into something that is not helpful to many labelled with this name.

Listen to the interview here on the Radio New Zealand website  presented by Kathryn Ryan.

Emma Thompson says work saved her from ‘going under’ in her battle with depression

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This article was in the New Zealand Herald today. I found it online at the Telegraph website here

I posted this article as I think it is important to see that people from all walks of life can have these experiences. She also talks of the Voices in  Her head. It does not say if this is in  the literal sense.

“By Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent
Published: 8:30AM BST 28 Mar 2010

 Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs,[you can listen to her Desert Island Disc session here] the Oscar-winning actress described being crippled throughout her life by the condition, which she first suffered while playing the leading role in a West End revival of the musical Me and My Girl in the 1980s.

She said: “I think my first bout of that was when I was doing Me and My Girl, funnily enough.

“I really didn’t change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk.

“That’s what actors do. But I think that was my first bout with an actual clinical depression.”

During the programme, which is broadcast today, Kirsty Young, the presenter, asked Thompson about a five-year period during the 1990s, when she starred in seven films, was nominated for five Oscars and was also divorced from the actor and director, Kenneth Branagh.

Asked how she stayed sane, Thompson replied: “I don’t think I did stay sane, actually. It was tough. I think I probably should have sought professional help long before I actually did, for all sorts of reasons.

“Yes, divorce, ghastly, painful business but also fame, in some ways a ghastly, painful business as well. You become slightly more public property in a way that’s not necessarily always comfortable.”

Thompson, 50, who is married to the actor Greg Wise, described how writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, in which she starred alongside Wise and Kate Winslet, helped her overcome another period of severe depression during the breakdown of her first marriage.

She said: “The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present.

“Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way.”

The star of films including Nanny McPhee, Love Actually and An Education, also described acting as “an escape from myself, which I’m ashamed to say I enjoy very much.”

Asked what she was escaping, Thompson said: “Oh, you know, the voices in my head. The constant “must do better”, “must try harder” plus “you’re too fat and not really a very good mother”.

“That punitive conscience is part of my psychiatric problem.”

Thompson also recounted how Wise initially pursued Winslet during the filming of Sense and Sensibility, because a soothsayer had told him that he would meet his future wife on the set.

She said: “Of course I was still married, so he thought it was Winslet and courted her assiduously. ..

See the rest of the article on the link above.

Here is an excerpt.

What the Bleep do we know? And Down the Rabbit hole.

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These movies are so great. They really open up your mind to the possibilities of the Universe, consciousness, and what is reality. A documentary combining science – quantum physics with spiritual concepts and consciousness.

I know they are oldies- have been put for some time. But they are still goodies, so decided they should be on here.

Below are  the trailers from you tube.

WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW

WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW- DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

They are available on DVD- documentary style.

Out Of our Heads- NZ Herald 13th May 2010

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There is a great article today in the New Zealand Herald today written by Chris Barton, an interview with Rufus May who is here , and running a workshop for us next  week.

Here is an edited excerpt – – To read the whole article- see it here

“Former psychiatric patient-turned-psychologist Rufus May has been shaking up the treatment of mental illness by talking to the voices people hear.

 Rufus May’s recovery from delusions – that he was an apprentice spy for the British secret service with a device in his chest that was being used to control him – took time.

He was 18 when he was admitted to Hackney psychiatric hospital in London, diagnosed as schizophrenic and not allowed to leave.

Initially, he believed he was in a place for burnt-out spies. “Eventually I thought people are being treated too badly for it to be a place for burnt-out spies.”

Surely burnt-out spies wouldn’t be humiliated, degraded and forcibly medicated – pinned to the floor while their trousers and underpants were pulled down to their ankles for an injection in the buttocks with mind-altering drugs?…

May had been getting messages about his mission from the Bible and the radio. Between the age of 15 and 16 he was a heavy cannabis user, but he wasn’t smoking at 18 when his troubles began – his first girlfriend left him after a nine-month relationship.

Instead of getting depressed, May drifted into a dreamlike reality, where he was spied upon and felt he had special spiritual powers. In hospital he still thought he could communicate with his girlfriend via the Bible. When he stopped getting messages back, he cried. The dream was over.

“I realised that actually I wasn’t that important and that I was in pyjamas in a psychiatric ward, dribbling. And then I started to think, ‘well, you’re in the pit of society now – the only way is up’.” Coincidentally Yazz’s 1988 pop hit The Only Way Is Up was playing on the radio.

Over 14 months May was admitted to hospital three times. His recovery began with going to church.

“I was religious with a capital R, then. I was trying to be a nicer person. I thought, ‘I need to find a way to be of value to society so they don’t lock me up again’.”

When he was discharged, he was put on two-weekly injections for about six months, as an outpatient. He decided to become a clinical psychologist. “I transformed, maybe not intentionally, but I found my mission – to try and change society’s approach to mental health. In a way he did become a spy. “For a while I infiltrated mental health services.”

It was cloak and dagger – when training in the East End, not far from where he had been sectioned, he was recognised on a couple of occasions by nurses. Fortunately they didn’t blow the whistle.

He didn’t tell his university about his illness until he was qualified. “I separated from my delusions and they became metaphors that I could use symbolically.”

May is in New Zealand doing some teaching with Hearing Voices Network Aotearoa NZ – a group dedicated to providing a better understanding of what it is like to hear voices and have visions and to reduce stigma around the experience.

During his mental illness, May didn’t hear voices. He had delusions and unusual beliefs. But that didn’t stop him being diagnosed with schizophrenia. “I was given that label when I was 18 and I had a psychotic episode.”

May argues the diagnosis of schizophrenia is a meaningless construct – a catch-all that does little more than label people with incurable hopelessness.

Is the label “psychotic episode” any better? “A bit. I had a breakdown. I quite like the lay terms: ‘I went crazy’ or, ‘I was mad’ – I don’t see them as any less scientific as saying ‘psychotic episode’.”

Though May can unpick the nonsense of psychiatric diagnoses, what’s really radical about what he does is his therapy. He talks to the voices that schizophrenics hear.

The idea developed from Accepting Voices by Marius Romme and Sandra Escher. It also builds on the work of people like Dirk Corstens, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist from the Netherlands, who runs voice dialogue workshops.

“I believe people’s voices are beings from their unconscious,” says May. “We all hear voices in our dreams. We all meet other people in our dreams – sometimes people we know, sometimes they’re not known to us or they are other creatures.”

He says people who hear voices are able to access their dream world when they’re awake. “They’ve got these characters talking to them.” He talks to the voices through a kind of role-play adapted from couples’ counselling techniques where different “parts” or personalities speak verbatim from a selected chair.

May says initially the voices often find him very threatening and do tell the person to hit him or worse. But so far, having spoken to hundreds of voices, it’s never happened. “I guess because I’m there to help the person and I’m being respectful. The first thing I teach people is that they don’t have to do what the voice says.”

The other thing May does is the opposite of what happens in exorcisms. He tells the voices he is not trying to get rid of them. When that message gets through he finds the voices often calm down.

Though the voices are like nightmare figures, mostly May finds they’re trying to protect the person – albeit in a macabre way. “So I don’t see them as the enemy. I’m just saying we need to have peace talks with those experiences, not have a war trying to shut them down with medication.”

May regards most mental health problems as some kind of post-traumatic reaction – be it the trauma of being alone, not having meaning in one’s life, or be having been abused. If voices are part of a person and the therapy is designed to get people to accept and understand their voices, how does May go about integrating an evil voice?

“It’s a destructive voice. I would define evil as causing harm. A destructive energy is a very frightened energy coming from some place of fear. So I don’t want to demonise it, I want to understand it.”

He describes the case of a placating and gentle man who had a an angry, commanding voice telling him to harm himself.

“I asked him to ask his voice why he wanted him to harm himself. The voice said, ‘to show people how powerful you are’.” The man then asked the voice whether, if he was powerful in other ways, he would still have to self-harm.

Would the voice be happy if he was powerful in other ways? “The voice said: ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for years’.” On face of it, the voice was evil, but what it represented was the man needing to reclaim power in his life.

In another case, May spoke to a person’s voice which was claiming to be a demon – an incubus. It said to him, “When you go home, take a long good look in the mirror”. May was a little threatened, but a few weeks later the person had a memory of her adopted mother saying, “look in the mirror, look at the evil in your eyes”. Here the voice was an echo from the past of a time of oppression.

“I see them as messengers,” says May. “They may appear as evil, but they’re messengers about injustice. Evil is part of life. Destruction and violence are part of our lives and we need to understand it, not cast it out.”

May believes people have different coping mechanisms for stress in their lives – “different ways of retreating from the world, or looking after ourselves that can sometimes turn into problems”. Problems we don’t really understand and which we call schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or manic behaviour. It’s a view that flies in the face of the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness that sees patients medicated to redress chemicals supposedly missing from their normal functioning.

May is not against the use of drugs in treating mental illness, but he does think they are used with too heavy a hand. “We are over-convinced of their value.” He is a fan of combining body therapies – running, walking, swimming, Tai Chi, dance or boxing – with other treatments.

“A lot of psychiatric therapy is moving to the idea that we should work with the body as much as the mind – we’ve probably got to get out of our heads.”

In in his own case, an obsessive preoccupation with his problems didn’t help. “The more one obsesses about something, the more real it can get.”

Yes, he agrees providing scientific evidence for his approach is difficult. “But we didn’t need an evidence base to show that slavery was wrong. We know people’s sadness or confusion is related to their lives. We also know that pills aren’t the final answer.”

What helped in his recovery was people accepting him and not giving up on him. “I think we could have brilliant mental health services, but still people would struggle because the community gives up on them and says, ‘We can’t help you, go to your doctor’.”

May says his work is about building an emancipatory social movement that frees people to help each other more.

“I am idealistic,” he says. “What I try to teach people with their voices is how [they can] appreciatively separate from these experiences and use them, but not be used by them .”

www.hearingvoices.org.nz

What a great article. We  at the HVN are grateful to Rufus for all his support for our organisation.

 

Early cannabis users 3 x more likely to have psychotic symptoms

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New research from the University Queensland shows the links between cannabis and psychosis.

See the original  article online here on the University Of Queensland website

Researchers at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute and School of Population Health have found young adults who use cannabis from an early age are three times more likely to suffer from psychotic symptoms.

A study of more than 3,800 21-year-olds has revealed those who use cannabis for six or more years have a greater risk of developing psychotic disorders or the isolated symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations and delusions.

The study is based on a group of children born at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital during the early 1980s. They have been followed-up for almost 30 years.

“This is the most convincing evidence yet that the earlier you use cannabis, the more likely you are to have symptoms of a psychotic illness,” lead investigator Professor John McGrath said.

The research, published in the latest edition of Archives of General Psychiatry, also included the results of 228 sets of siblings.

“We were able to look at the association between early cannabis use and later psychotic symptoms in siblings. We know they have the same mother, they most likely have the same father and, because they’re close in age, they share common experiences, which allows us to get a sharper focus on the specific links between cannabis and psychosis – there is less background noise.

“Looking at siblings is a type of natural experiment – we found the same links within the siblings as we did in the entire sample. The younger you are when you started to use cannabis – the greater the risk of having psychotic symptoms at age 21. This finding makes the results even stronger,” Professor McGrath said.

“The message for teenagers is: if they choose to use cannabis they have to understand there’s a risk involved. Everyone takes risks every day – think of the sports we play or the way we drive – and people need to know that we now believe that early cannabis use is a risk for later psychotic illness.”

Schizophrenia is a serious disorder that affects about 1 in a 100 Australians, and usually first presents in young adults. This is also the time when the brain seems most vulnerable to cannabis. “

UNDERSTANDING VOICES AND WORKING TO RECOVERY- A WORKSHOP WITH RUFUS MAY

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HEARING VOICES NETWORK AOTEAROA NZ Te Reo Orooro 

 Are hosting a 1 day workshop

 “Understanding Voices and working towards

Recovery”

With

RUFUS MAY

www.rufusmay.com

 

Rufus May is a clinical psychologist from the UK. He has written articles and teaches widely on psychotic experiences and recovery processes. His approach is also influenced by his experience of psychosis at the age of 18 and recovery. Rufus is an active member and supporter of the Hearing Voices Network UK .

The workshop will include:

  • Hearing Voices the experience of what are voices like 
  •  How do challenging voices behave?  How can we understand this?
  •  Hearing Voices research
  •  Coping Strategies
  •  Forming a construct/ understanding of the voice hearing experience
  •  Emotional healing, personal development work
  •  Using the Voice dialogue model to understand and work with voices (this  includes role play  exercises)
  •  Recovery stories
  •  Demonstration of using the Voice dialogue approach
When: 9.30 to 4 PM Wednesday 17th March 2010Where: Western Springs Garden Community Hall 956 Great  North Rd Western Springs.

Cost: $100 for waged-We would like to encourage support people to bring a voice hearer with them. And offer a discount of for this i.e $90 instead of $120 for both people. $20 for unwaged voice hearers and family members.

n.b Morning and afternoon tea provided. Participants to provide their own lunch.    

We are a registered charity. These fees will help support our voluntary work.

Bookings: Call Adrienne at 0272650266 for more details or email: info@hearingvoices.org.nz  for a registration form. Please note spaces are limited. If you don’t want to be disappointed you will need to book asap.

to download a flier and registration from, please visit Hearing voices Network Aotearoa NZ’s Website