This year Hearing Voices Network Cymru, Working to Recovery and Asylum Associates are working in partnership to host this exciting event.

For more information: They will be announcing more details in March. This will include booking information and a call for papers.

For updated information go to World Hearing Voices Congress 2012.

The commission has been launched by Rethink Mental Illness and is chaired by  Professor Sir Robin Murray. The commissioners’ expertise covers health and social care, personal and family experience of living with schizophrenia and mental health research. They are seeking views for organisations, individuals and researchers. We recommend you respond and push for recovery based practice and policies. For more information go to www.schizophreniacommission.org.uk

We have prepared a pdf version of a 7 page leaflet Recovery and Hearing Voices Resources which provides further information about hearing voices, research references, publications and links.

Most voices – even negative ones – respond well to being treated with respect, says visiting Scottish mental health trainer Ron Coleman.

Full story here

Conversations with ourselves, New Zealand Herald, 4th June 2011

Ron Coleman, diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1982, should know. He spent 10 years in and out of British psychiatric hospitals, including six as a mostly compulsorily “sectioned” in-patient. During that time he was heavily medicated with a range of antipsychotic drugs and given 40 sessions of ECT.

Today he lives happily with his wife, family and seven voices. The workshop at the Western Springs Community Hall is part of a global grassroots organisation known as the Hearing Voices Network.

More information here

Are voices real — or are they just auditory hallucinations and sign of mental illness?

Is it best to try to control and get rid of voices — or listen and discover their meaning? After being sexually abused by a priest and in grief at the death of his first wife, Scottish advocate Ron Coleman started hearing voices, was labeled a chronic schizophrenic and spent six years in psychiatric hospitals. Ron describes his remarkable recovery, and how he became a renowned teacher and leading trainer with the Hearing Voices movement in the UK.

For more info — http://www.madnessradio.net

Go to this episode on the Madness Radio site: http://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-living-voices-ron-coleman

Hearing Voices Network Cymru Wales to invite you to apply for Hearing Voices Books – DVD Resource Pack. Applications are invited from around the world. This pack will be provided free of charge to successful applicants.

You can find further information about the Pack and how to apply here

Throughout the world, in the last thirty years, governments have been increasingly involved in the development of policies and strategies focused on the introduction of community-based mental health systems, which have been substituting old institutional approaches.

Nevertheless, efficient services which are able to deliver comprehensive and high-quality responses have been developed only in a relatively small number of places, and this is especially the case in large cities. On the other hand, there are very clear directives paving the way for the introduction of these elements, which are provided, on the one hand, by the European institutions, and, on the other, by the WHO.

In the book “Oltre i muri / Beyond the Walls”, eighteen speakers from different parts of Europe describe and analyse the exemplary experiences they have developed over the last few years or decades.

Click here for further details.

University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila”- Aula Magna
(Bucharest, Thursday 25th and Friday 26th November 2010).

For a full programme of the conference click here to download