Making Sense of Hearing Voices - Romme Marius, Dirk Corstens, Sandra Escher

This magnificent book brings together in one volume all thetheory, learning, research, wisdom from practice and practical examples of therevolutionary work of Marius Romme, Sandra Escher and Dirk Corstens intosupporting people who hear voices. Challenging the fundamental premises ofmainstream psychiatry, Romme, Escher and Corstens have pioneered their approachof 'making sense of voices' since the 1980s. They were the first to listen toand talk with the voices of voice hearers, and to realise that the identitiesof the voices and what they had to say held huge meaning in the contexts ofvoice hearers' lives. These were not hallucinations or delusions but phenomenawhose words offered clues both to the person's history (frequently of childhoodabuse and severe trauma) and how they might be helped to learn to live withtheir voices and recover. For far too many people, the blunt interventionspreferred by mainstream psychiatry - incarceration in psychiatric institutions,loss of independence and long-term reliance on welfare and heavy doses ofneuroleptics and tranquillisers - had in fact robbed them of the mental andemotional capacity and external resources they needed to help themselves. This book explains the history and reports the wealth of researchconducted to support this way of working, together with detailed practicaladvice on how to use the approach with voice hearers. Drawing on the accountsof numerous voice hearers, in addition to the clinical research, this book isthe go-
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