“They were a symbol of recovery and hope for me when I didn’t have any hope at all. “I didn’t know what a peer worker was before that,” they admit. Kate was prompted to pursue peer work by the peer workers they’d met during their journey. They had completed Bachelor degrees in Arts and Health Sciences, and also have their own lived experience of mental health issues and recovery. Kate has worked at Mind Australia for two years. Whereas if you try to resist them and fight them, they can get bigger and bigger.” Not all peer work is the same “One example is that if you give half an hour to listen to your voices every day and cap it at that, often the voices will feel heard and grow calm. They might be a call to integrate and process something that happened in the past.”Īs such, advice to ignore or suppress the voices, or insistence that they’re not real, is detrimental. Often hearing voices is a symptom of past trauma, says Kate. We spent time doing voice profiling, how people can depersonalise from their voices and talk about them in ways that aren’t overwhelming.” “We debunked myths around hearing voices, and studied famous people who hear or heard voices, like Lady Gaga and Virginia Woolf. “It is peer led, run by people with lived experience of hearing voices. Kate explains the training contained specific learnings related to hearing voices, as well as skills that can be applied more broadly, such as techniques for group facilitation. Kate accessed MHV’s Lived Experience Workforce Grants Program in order to complete the training. As a peer worker, they come into regular contact with members of Mind Australia’s consumer community who hear voices. Kate recently completed training run by Uniting’s Voices Vic Program. A lot of people don’t actually want to get rid of their voices.” In fact, “some voices can be beneficial, super friendly and positive”, says Kate. “That’s not the case at all,” says Mind Australia’s Kate Drinan. They might be viewed as potentially angry or violent, driven to dark places by demons that whisper in their ears. People who hear voices can face an especially acute degree of stigma.
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