Hearing Voices Movement - The Movement

The Movement

The Hearing Voices Movement can be said to have been established in 1987, by Romme and Escher, both from the Netherlands, with the formation of Stichting Weerklank (Foundation Resonance), an organization for voice hearers and others interested in this phenomenon. In 1988, an organization The Hearing Voices Network was established in England, with the active support of Romme. In following years, further networks have been established in other countries including Italy, Finland (1995), Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Germany (1998), Norway, Denmark, Japan (1996), Israel, New Zealand, Australia and the USA (2006).

In 1997 a meeting of voice hearers and mental health workers was held in Maastricht to discuss developing the further promotion and research into the issue of voice hearing. The meeting decided to create a formal organizational structure to provide administrative and coordinating support to the wide variety of initiatives in the different involved countries. The new network was called INTERVOICE (The International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices). INTERVOICE holds annual steering group meetings, encourages and supports exchanges and visits between member countries and the translation and publication of books and other literature on the subject of hearing voices. INTERVOICE was incorporated in 2007 as a not for profit company under UK law. Its president is Marius Romme.

INTERVOICE is supported by people who hear voices, relatives and friends and mental health professionals including nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists. INTERVOICE members assert that the most important factor in the success of their approach is the importance placed on the personal engagement of the people involved, meaning that all participants are considered an expert of their own experience. They see each other first as people, secondly as equal partners, and thirdly as all having different but mutually valuable expertise to offer. This can either be through direct experience of hearing voices or having worked with voice hearers (and/or a desire to be involved).

INTERVOICE is critical of psychiatry in relation to the way the profession generally understands and treats people who hear voices and holds that their research has led them to the position that schizophrenia is an unscientific and unhelpful hypothesis which should be abandoned.

The Hearing Voices Movement regards itself as being a post-psychiatric organisation, positioning itself outside of the mental health world in recognition that voices, in their view, are an aspect of human differentness, rather than a mental health problem and that, as with homosexuality (also regarded by psychiatry in historical times as an illness), one of the main issues is about human rights. As with homosexuality, members of the movement intend to change the way society perceives the experience, and psychiatry's attitude will follow.

The Hearing Voices Movement is also seeking more holistic health solutions to problematic and overwhelming voices that cause mental distress than what it regards as the generally reductionist, disease based model offered by mainstream psychiatry. Based on their research, they hold the opinion that many people successfully live with their voices and that in themselves voices are not the problem. For this reason they are prepared to accept a range of explanations offered by people who hear voices, including spiritual ones and assert that recovery (see recovery model) from overwhelming voices can be achieved by seeking to understand the meaning of the voices to the voice hearer. This approach informed the 2005 television documentary Voices in My Head (2005) by British director David Malone made for UK's Channel Four.

A detailed and neutral account of the significance of the Hearing Voice Movement entitled "Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?" was published in New York Times Magazine in 2007. Its author Daniel B. Smith writes that the movement's

brief against psychiatry can be boiled down to two core positions. The first is that many more people hear voices, and hear many more kinds of voices, than is usually assumed. The second is that auditory hallucination — or “voice-hearing,” H.V.N.’s more neutral preference — should be thought of not as a pathological phenomenon in need of eradication but as a meaningful, interpretable experience, intimately linked to a hearer’s life story and, more commonly than not, to unresolved personal traumas.