Maastricht Interview for Hearing Voices: A Social and Biographical Approach to Hearing Voices, a Lived Experience Perspective
This workshop provides training in the Maastrict Interview for mental health care workers, including psychologists, peer specialists, social workers, therapists, counselors, and others who support individuals experiencing voice hearing.
The Maastricht approach involves accepting and making sense of a person’s voices and establishing a link between what the voices say and the person’s life experiences, as a means of providing both relief and the possibility of recovery. It offers an alternative to traditional psychiatric frameworks, viewing voices not as symptoms of illness but as meaningful responses to overwhelming emotions and life events. Participants will gain an understanding of the historical, cultural, and epidemiological contexts of voice hearing, and develop competence in conducting the structured Maastricht Hearing Voices Interview.
The interview itself explores key areas such as the nature and characteristics of the voices; the voice hearer’s personal history; triggers; the content of the voices; personal explanations for their origin; the impact of the voices on daily life; the relational dynamic between the voice hearer and their voices; and coping strategies. It also covers experiences in childhood, treatment history, and the person’s social network.
The workshop also provides an opportunity for the participants to understand the underlying principles of this approach and practice skills by interviewing voice hearers who have been through the Maastricht interview process.
This course will be in four sessions:
- Tuesday, July 22 from 1:00pm - 5:00pm EST
- Wednesday, July 23 from 1:00pm - 5:00pm EST
- Tuesday, July 29 from 1:00pm - 5:00pm EST
- Wednesday, July 30 from 1:00pm - 5:00pm EST
The total CEUs available is 15.
This is an interactive course and must be attended live.
CE Board Approvals: American Psychological Association (APA), Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB), and New York Education Department Boards for Social Work, Licensed Mental Health Counselors, Psychologists, and Marriage and Family Therapists.
Course must be attended live to receive CE credits.
About the presenter: The chair of the National Paranoia Network, Pete Bullimore is a testament to how effective accepting and working with voices and paranoia can be. Pete heard his first voice when he was aged seven. "I heard a child's voice telling me to keep going, that everything would be OK. It was reassuring, a bit like an imaginary friend," he says. But as bad things happened in my life the voices increased in number, eventually turning sinister and aggressive. "They told me to set myself on fire, to slash myself and destroy myself, often 20 or 30 voices all shouting at me at once," he says. By his mid-twenties Pete had lost his business, his family, his home, everything. "The voices just encompassed my life; I curled up in a chair and didn't wash or eat. I was locked in a world of voices, paranoia and depression, and it was probably the most frightening time of my life," he says. Pete spent more than a decade after that on heavy medication, but the voices never went away. He had to get out of the psychiatric system to recover. It was only when he came off the medication and met people who share his experiences at the Hearing Voices Network that he was able to stop being so afraid of the voices and actually start listening to them. He changed his relationship with his voices and worked through the meaning of his voices and paranoia. He now runs his own training and consultancies agencies the National Paranoia Network, Asylum Associates & the Sheffield Hearing Voices Network delivering training on hearing voices, childhood trauma, paranoia and how to use the Maastricht interview for hearing voices & problematic thoughts, beliefs and paranoia internationally. He is a guest lecturer at fifteen Universities in the UK. He has set up Maastricht Centre’s at the Radbone unit in Derby and the Hartington unit in Chesterfield in collaboration with Derby NHS trust; he has now launched a Maastricht Approach center in Bradford and a National Maastricht Center in Telford. "I wouldn't want to get rid of my voices now, they're part of me," he says.