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Electronic version available
By Daniel Fisher, MD, PhD
I hope for a day when: Every person who experiences extreme emotional states is engaged in respectful, hopeful, humanistic, and empowering relationships that enable them to heal and recover full, meaningful lives in the community. Instead of being seen as threats to society, we will be seen as a source of wisdom that we have obtained through our recovery. Practices like Open Dialogue will eliminate the long-term iatrogenic effects of a prophesy of doom and lifelong illness. Suffering will be seen as an understandable human response to trauma rather than a chemical imbalance or a defective fear circuit. Voluntary, community-based, recovery-oriented, culturally attuned, traumainformed services and housing will replace psychiatric hospitals. The mental health system will be run by persons with lived experience of recovery from extreme emotional states. Everyone will learn how to assist each other through extreme emotional states by learning communication skills such as Emotional CPR. -
Hearing Voices that are Distressing: A Simulated Training Experience and Self-Help Strategies
Just as rehabilitation students gain insight into the experience of physical disability by using wheelchairs, so too can mental health professionals and students experience a simulation of some of the challenges facing people with psychiatric disabilities. Who should attend this training? This training has been developed and piloted for a wide range of people including: inpatient/outpatient psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists; direct care workers in residential, day treatment and psychosocial rehabilitation programs; mental health administrators and policy makers; family members and friends; and academic faculty and students. A modified version of this training emphasizing self help skill building (and no simulation experience) is available for voice hearers who want to learn to control or eliminate distressing voices. Hearing voices that are distressing is a training in which participants use headphones for listening to a specially designed audiotape. During this simulated experience of hearing voices, participants undertake a series of tasks including social interaction in the community, a psychiatric interview, cognitive testing, and an activities group in a mock day treatment program. The simulation experience is followed by a debriefing and discussion period. The workshop also includes:- A lecture exploring the research and literature on hearing distressing voices
- Presentation of self-help strategies for coping with or eliminating distressing voices
- Practice exercises where participants learn to teach self-help skills to voice hearer
- To empathize more deeply with the challenges voice hearers face
- To reduce the fear and stigma surrounding the voice hearing experience
- To learn to teach self help skills to voice hearers
Call the National Empowerment Center at 1-800-769-3728 for more information
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Director/Producer PJ Moynihan Producer Oryx Cohen Executive Producer Gayle R. Berg, PhD -
By Claire Bien Paperback 272 pages -
By Hanne Arts Paperback 218 pages -
By Will Hall Paperback 402 pages -
Research studies, articles and book excerpts on recovery. All compiled into one publication!
This publication dispels the myth that people labeled with mental illness need to lead lives of endless desperation and broken dreams. Inspire a new generation of consumers, caregivers, administrators, and families! -
Electronic version availableBy Patricia Deegan, PhD
Self-help strategies for people who hear voices that are distressing
This self-help guide can help you gain control over or eliminate voices that are distressing. The 22 page booklet, includes 18 fully illustrated self-help strategies that can help you take a stand, find your own voice and reach your goals! -
Electronic version available
Developed with the assistance of diverse leaders from across the U.S.
Emotional CPR is a public health education program designed to teach people the skills to assist others through emotional crisis and regain a sense of hope and purpose in their lives. This workbook was developed for the eCPR certification training and provides a thoughtful discussion of the values of eCPR, the features of dialogue, and the primary components of eCPR: C = Connection, P = emPowering, and R = Revitalizing. Other sections include how to prepare oneself to provide eCPR as well as tips for self-care. The workbook is filled with inspiring quotes, real-life examples of embodying the practice of eCPR, sample instructions for role plays, and other exercises. The workbook is designed for anyone who may encounter a person in emotional crisis – law enforcement, mental health peers, mental health providers, family members, and others. If you are interested in learning more about eCPR, or would like to request an eCPR training, please visit www.emotional-cpr.org.
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By Daniel Mackler
Healing Homes, a feature-length documentary film directed by Daniel Mackler, chronicles the work of the Family Care Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden -- a program which, in this era of multi-drug cocktails and psychiatric diagnoses-for-life, helps people recover from psychosis without medication. The organization, backed by over twenty years of experience, places people who have been failed by traditional psychiatry in host families -- predominately farm families in the Swedish countryside -- as a start for a whole new life journey. Host families are chosen not for any psychiatric expertise, rather, for their compassion, stability, and desire to give back. People live with these families for upwards of a year or two and become an integral part of a functioning family system. Staff members offer clients intensive psychotherapy and provide host families with intensive supervision. The Family Care Foundation eschews the use of diagnosis, works within a framework of striving to help people come safely off psychiatric medication, and provides their services, which operate within the context of Swedish socialized medicine, for free. Healing Homes weaves together interviews with clients, farm families, and staff members to create both a powerful vision of medication-free recovery and an eye-opening critique of the medical model of psychiatry.
