Today I gave the keynote
address at the International Healing Voices Conference in Melbourne.   The conference was organized by Voices Vic
(for Victoria, the state in which Melbourne lies).   Speakers came from around the world -- Ron Coleman
(who started the Hearing Voices Network in the U.K.); a woman from Auckland,
New Zealand; Eleanor, a young woman/psychologist/voice hearer from Australia,
and more.   Unlike most mental health
conference, where the attendees are mostly practitioners of various kinds, this
conference was mostly "patients".   And
was it different!   The energy was so
upbeat!   The conference was all about
hope and recovery.   People told inspiring
story after story of being severely mentally ill and recovering to the point of
becoming a practicing psychologist, for example.   I'll start with Eleanor's story.

By all appearances
Eleanor was an aspiring young psychologist.  
She could have help her own at any professional meeting.   She was attractive, articulate, well-dressed,
well-spoken -- the kind of graduate any psychology program would be proud to
proclaim.   However, once upon a time, she
had been a patient in the mental health system.  
She heard voices that tortured her.  
Once she tried to drill a hole in her head to let the voice out.   She wasn't trying to harm herself.   She just really believed that the voice would
leave if it had an exit pathway.   Her
longest hospitalization had been for 5 months and she had more of them than she
could count or remember.   She had
connected with the Hearing Voices Movement and had learned how to manage her
voices.   Slowly but surely the positive
voices gained sway over the negative voices.  
Eventually her mind became more peaceful and she was able to return to
her University studies.   She could
concentrate and learn again and went on to complete a doctorate in clinical
psychology and to become a licensed psychologist.

As so many people have
told me, Eleanor reported that the medications only made her worse.   The drugs didn't touch the voices.   They just made her completely unable to
think.   Being unable to think prevented
her from doing the cognitive therapy she needed to do to learn how to manage the
voices.   Being unable to think left her
in complete misery.   Eleanor told us that
she wasn't against medication or anything that helped people.   She would have been happy to take a drug that
worked.   However, she said, "I'm against
forcing people to take drugs that don't work and make them worse and prevent
them from working through the problem."  
For that she received a standing ovation from the audience.   I was impressed.   This was not an anti-psychiatry group.   This was a group of pro-active consumers
demanding realism of outcome.   They were
angry with a mental health system which pretended to help when it didn't and
actually made them worse.

However, I have gone
ahead of myself.   The conference began
with a welcome from its organizer, a woman named Indigo, who also heard voices.   Then the "Welcome to Country" was given by an
aboriginal man from the people who originally inhabited the area that is now
known as Melbourne.   He played an amazing
concert on a digeridoo that he had made.  
Then, to my surprise, a North American aboriginal man came out to
dance.   He was Ojibway from Minnesota.   The music started and to my surprise it was a
Lakota song.   He didn't dance.   He waited and waited.   Then he looked at Indigo puzzled.   "You put on the wrong song," he said.   He went to the podium and clicked the correct
song on the computer.   Ojibway words
filled the room instead of the Lakota.   I
had known that song and was singing along.  
However, I knew Ojibway wouldn't dance necessarily to Lakota.   That's been a rivalry for hundreds of
years.   In 1420, the Lakota attempted to
defeat the Ojibway in the area around Thunder Bay, Ontario.   The Lakota suffered a miserable defeat.   I'm reminded of that every time I visit
Thunder Bay.

Next came the official
welcome and address from the Chair of the Agency funding Voices Vic, which was
delivered by a man named Quinn from Prahan Mission.   To my surprise, our host, Tony Gee, had
worked with Quinn in the past at other agencies.   Tony is the Chair of Life Is ". Foundation,
which is one of the collaborators in our Australian Cross Cultural
Exchange.   Life Is" has a mission of
preventing suicide and assisting those left behind by a suicide to heal.   Then came my talk.   I'm going to share what I had to say, but first
more observations from the conference.

The strong indigenous
presence also contributed to making this a different kind of conference than others
I have attended.   We heard often that
aboriginal healers were not afraid of voices.  
Hearing voices is normal and honored in the aboriginal community.   One hears the voices of the ancestors, the
voices of spirits, the voices of the animals and of nature.   To be a voice hearer is a privilege and an
honor.   Aboriginal elders were present
from diverse parts of Australia to share how they assisted people who heard
frightening and terrifying voices.

All this converged on the
subject of my talk -- that hearing voices is an ordinary human experience that
we all have.   What's different is the
spin we put on the voices and the voices to which we give our attention.   I showed brain imaging slides for "hearing
voices", "people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia who were not at the moment
hearing voices, and so called "normal controls".   I joked with the audience about not knowing
where they could have found a room full of normal people, since they were so
rare.   The imaging studies suggested that
the only difference was in the frontal lobes.  
The frontal lobes are what we use to make up stories about our
voices.   One story is that these are just
our own thoughts.   Then we call those
people with intrusive and disturbing thoughts "OCD".   We spare them the psychosis diagnosis because
they know the thoughts are their own despite their disturbing and even
terrifying nature.   In other stories, the
Voices are Ascended Masters trying to take over one's mind for the purpose of
eternal punishment.   In the indigenous
story, some of these voices are the whispters of the ancestors, some of them
come from the spirits, and one's job is to listen carefully to all the voices
and practice discernment.   An elder told
us never do anything a voice tells you to do if it will hurt you or someone
else.   Good spirits wouldn't tell you to
hurt anyone or hurt yourself.   They're
funny and they make you feel good.   My
suggestion is that hearing voices isn't abnormal and isn't even worthy of
treatment or diagnosis.   Instead, people
suffer due to the stories they create or absorb about what the voices mean and
who they are and also for being fixated on negative voices that criticize,
castigate, berate, wheedle, and excoriate their listener. I suggested that this
tendency to focus on the negative voices is related to painful life experiences
which was in keeping with Eleanor's talk (came after mine) in which she
reported that people who experience trauma are 46 times more likely to receive
a psychotic diagnosis than those who don't.  
Eleanor's trauma was being raped and molested repetitively in a day care
center run by pedophiles.   She told us
her home life otherwise was atraumatic and that her parents had been loving and
warm, but she had had no way to express her traumatic experiences since they
occurred when she was so young and they just kept building inside of her like a
pressure cooker ready to explode which she finally did during her second year
at college.

I suggested that the work
with voices was to make sure all voices are heard and none are necessarily more
privileged than others even when those inner voices match the broader messages
of the dominant culture.   I introduced
Bakhtin, Hermans, and dialogical self theory to the group.   The Russian, Mikhail Bakhtin, is easily one
of my favorite philosophers.   In one
often quoted passage, he described the mind as a room filled with a cacophony
of polyphonous voices, each arguing with the other, each trying to achieve
ascendency, some forming shifting coalitions to win out over others (sounds
like the U.S. Congress to me!).   He
thought Doestoevsky had done the best job describing the mind in this manner,
especially in Crime and Punishment, in the way in which Raskolnikov's mind is
presented.

Hermans and his
colleagues have taken this further into a mature psychological theory which
matches the concepts of social constructionism and critical
constructivism.   The mind consists of
many "me's".   Each "me" emerges to manage
a particular relationship and collection of stories related to that
relationship.     More about this tomorrow!