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The Hearing Voices Network (Daniel B. Smith - The New York Times)
March 27, 2007 11:25 PM
A brief except from an excellent and lengthy piece published by the New York Times.
Copyright The New York Times
I first met Angelo at a meeting of the group in mid-January. (I was given permission to sit in on the condition that I not divulge the participants’ last names.) The meeting took place in the bright, cheerfully decorated back room of a community mental-health center in North Finchley, an affluent, grassy suburb in the northern reaches of London. The gathering was small but eclectic. In addition to the group’s facilitators — Jo Kutchinsky, an occupational therapist, and Liana Kaiser, a social-work student — five men and women assembled in a circle of bulky wool-knit chairs around a worn coffee table. Besides Angelo, there was Stewart, a young, working-class Londoner with a shaved head and a hoop earring; Jenny, an affable woman in her 50s who spoke of her fondness for arts and crafts; Michelle, a heavyset woman who dominated the session with her forceful opinions; and David, a 60-something man with a thick gray beard and a pageboy haircut who slumped in his seat and dozed throughout much of the meeting.
Angelo was the newest member of this group — it was his third visit — and he did not seem inclined to participate fully. When Kutchinsky opened the meeting by asking each member to discuss the previous week’s experience hearing voices, he softly mentioned that his voices made it difficult to read, then quickly ceded the floor. What followed was sometimes painful. Stewart in particular was visibly agitated. His hallucinatory life, as he described it, was chaotic and irrepressible. He heard voices pleading to him for help; he heard the voices of strangers; he heard the voice of his father. Sometimes he heard the voices of military commandos, who offered to defend him against this confusion. “I haven’t been well for a long time,” he said glumly. Yet most of the members spoke of their voices in the way that comedians speak of mothers-in-law: burdensome and irritating, but an inescapable part of life that you might as well learn to deal with. When David’s name was called, he lifted his head and discussed his struggle to accept his voices as part of his consciousness. “I’ve learned over time that my voices can’t be rejected,” he said. “No matter what I do, they won’t go away. I have to find a way to live with them.” Jenny discussed how keeping busy quieted her voices; she seemed to have taken a remarkable number of adult-education courses. Michelle expressed her belief that her voices were nothing more exotic than powerfully negative thoughts. “Negative thoughts are universal,” she said. “Everyone has them. Everyone. What matters is how you cope with them: that’s what counts.”
I had trouble gauging Angelo’s reaction throughout these testimonies, so afterward I pulled him aside and asked him what he thought. “It’s interesting to hear people’s stories,” he said. “Before I started coming, I hadn’t realized just how long some people have suffered. I’ve heard voices for six years. Some people have heard them for 15 or 20. It’s amazing.” I asked him if this knowledge reassured or frightened him. “It’s a bit scary, in a way. I think, I could be this way for a long time.” Still, he appeared to appreciate the camaraderie. For years, he had been socially isolated. He spends most of his time with his parents and a sympathetic older sister. His neighbors know only that he is “off work.” It was comforting, he said, to speak at last with people who understood.
The meeting that I attended in London is one of dozens like it affiliated with a small but influential grass-roots organization known as Hearing Voices Network. Based in Manchester, Hearing Voices Network (H.V.N.) has since its inception, in 1991, developed a range of services related to the phenomenon known as auditory hallucination: a hot line for people who suffer from the experience, a series of educational workshops for mental-health professionals and 170 support groups across Britain, with more in development. H.V.N., which openly challenges the standard psychiatric relationship of expert physician and psychotic patient, might be said to take the consumer movement in mental health care to its logical endpoint. Although H.V.N. groups meet in a variety of settings — from psychiatric wards to churches to the organization’s headquarters — all must be run by, or there must be active plans for them to be run by, voice-hearers themselves. What’s more, H.V.N. groups must accept all interpretations of auditory hallucinations as equally valid. If an individual comes to a group claiming that he is hearing the voice of the queen of England, and he finds this belief useful, no attempt is made to divest him of it, but rather to figure out what it means to him…
Read "The Hearing Voices Network"
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