If you are a mental health worker who often, or even just sometimes, works with people who hear voices, see visions, or have really different, scary, or disorganized perspectives on the world, you may have had difficulty finding training in psychological approaches that can help people overcome the distress and disability often associated with these experiences.
When I sought such training over a decade ago, I had to turn to the UK to find it There, professionals and people with lived experience (for example within the Hearing Voices Network) were collaborating in developing new approaches, many of which were then researched and developed as “CBT for Psychosis.”
Once I did that, I found out about lots of amazing stuff – such as ways to understand “psychotic” experiences as just manageable variations of normal human difficulties, connections between trauma, dissociation and psychosis, ways people can change relationships with voices and other difficult experiences so they possibly became more helpful than harmful, and ways to help resolve psychological dilemmas that often underlie fixed “delusional” beliefs.
This April, at JFK University in Berkeley, I am offering two seminars that could help you learn how to implement some of these practices.
- April 17, 2015: CBT for Psychosis, An Individualized, Recovery Oriented Approach
and then
- April 18, 2015: Trauma, Dissociation and Psychosis: CBT and Other Approaches to Understanding and Recovery
You can click the above links to get more information, and/or if you want to register.
I hope to see many of you at one or both of these seminars! And, please consider passing this information on to others who may be interested……
Ron Unger LCSW
