The Yearly Hearing Voices Conference

- a critique of presentation and style

Some of us my the local Hearing Voices Group, attended the Hearing Voices Conference, on the 7th of December 2001, at a local University.

One voice hearer commented afterwards that he felt that the speakers mainly addressed a professional audience in their choice of humour and presentation, mainly because they set out to convert professionals over to an acceptable, entertaining, and common image of a person diagnosed with mental health problems.

Otherwise, the talks would have been based-upon a fairly sound user or survivor recovery model, but I agree with the other voice hearer that in humour and presentation, the speakers created a very similar stereotypical image to the old one of the psychiatric diagnosed person, and which perhaps also showed their professional aspirations in terms of who the talks were
largely aimed at.

I was pleased with some of the actual content of the talks, but would have preferred it if they were entirely user or survivor speakers. The overall general theme of all three main conference talks, was that dissociation is a coping-mechanism, and a symptom of being sexually abused,
and a cause of self-harm and hearing voices; along with some admission by the speakers that the psychiatric mental health system participated in setting up different-versions-of-reality.

Dissociation, basically means, that the abused person makes the pain of being abused go to another part of their brain or consciousness, so that they are not consciously experiencing it, and this involves distracting or imagining one is absent from the reality of the abuse and the situation. As a way of describing how hard it is to dissociate from abuse, the first
speaker asked the audience to think of the word "elephant", and then asked the audience not to think of the word "elephant", emphasising how hard it was not to think of the word, once it had been suggested, thought of, and experienced.

The three d's were mentioned by the speakers of dissociation, distraction, and depersonalisation. It was also mentioned that an event or action in adult life can trigger memories of abuse, and onset mental and emotional distress which can lead to hearing voices.

The matter of dissociation wasn't questioned, discussed, or debated, other than by one participant in the audience at the very end of the talks, who asked the speakers if they were using some sort of cognitive-behavioural model to describe sexual abuse, self-harm, and hearing voices; to which it was replied that the speakers take an approach which integrates the mental,
emotional, and physical aspects of analysis and recovery.

There were three main talks: one on Sexual Abuse, one on Self Harm, and one on Hearing Voices, followed by a choice of three workshops on each subject matter. I was disappointed that all three workshops were on at the same time, because I was interested in all three workshops, but I chose to attend the Hearing Voices Workshop because I thought that as a more general theme, it might be more relevant to our local hearing voices group. I was also disappointed that no draft copies of written information based upon all three talks was not available.

The first talk on Sexual Abuse, described how abusers set up different-versions-of-reality, how abusers groom and control their victims in order to sexually abuse them, and then convince them to buy into different-versions-of-reality - that the abuse is their fault, or that they in some way wanted, needed, or deserved to be abused. This whole area only concentrated on sexual abuse, and not on other types of child abuse and domestic violence, that are not overtly sexual, but may have similar control patterns and psychological consequences.

The first speaker described how some of the myths of different-versions-of-reality can be social and cultural, and she described the dissociation strategies or mechanisms which are used for coping with the intolerable mental, emotional, and physical pain of being sexually abused. The speaker described mental, emotional, and volitional distraction very well, and emphasised that distraction and dissociation take up a lot of time and energy of the person who is trying to cope with being sexually abused, and that physical distraction as a coping-mechanism can be misinterpreted as so-called behavioural problems.

The first speaker more or less concluded by saying that we need to be in equal relationships in order for us to have creative relationships and live and thrive creatively, and without someone else's professional power and control over us, and that we need to be strong together.

The second talk, on Self Harm, started off with the speaker talking about his experiences as a psychiatric nurse, his experiences of being sexually abused as a child and being a self-harmer; and he then presented a critique of medical psychiatric diagnosis, talked about the dissociation strategies of self-harmers, and described how he saw recovery in terms of therapeutic relationships, and the eventual autonomy of the person from mental health services.

The third speaker, on Hearing Voices, talked about his experience of being sexually abused as a child, his experiences of being psychiatric diagnosed, how being sexually abused was connected to his experiences of hearing voices, and how he used dissociation in order to cope with the mental, emotional, and physical pain of being abused. The Hearing Voices workshop looked into an understanding of hearing voices as to do with people's life-experiences and belief systems, and the speaker took questions from the audience, and described how he had worked with others in order to help them understand, recover, or come to terms with their experiences as voice hearers.

I agree with the speakers that some dissociation exists, but I also think that it's a bit of a myth and a mentalism, and I'm not convinced how effective it is as a coping-mechanism, because depersonalisation and derealisation can go along with dissociation, and which can still involve much mental, emotional, and physical suffering. The theory of dissociation, may therefore be used to deny the reality of a persons suffering, and in itself sets up a different-version-of-reality. It also occurred to me that setting up different-versions-of-reality might in itself be a form of so-called dissociation. Dissociation is not merely a psychological concept, but is also a social and political one, and can therefore be a euphemism for marginalisation and coercive distancing. The whole area of dissociation didn't make a distinction between dissociation as a cause (violence, abuse, and coercion) and dissociation as effect (as a coping-mechanism and symptom).

Some of the coercive aspects of so-called dissociation can be best described by referring to the film G. I. Jane where upon entering the army, a woman finds that the people who are supposed to supporting her are corrupt, as they urge her to distance herself from the social and political reality of things.