Download flier here.

Are you in a relationship with someone who experiences visions, different realities, or hears voices? Would you like to find a better way to communicate with your loved one about their experiences? 

As family members, how do we deal with our own fears and anxieties? How should we view our loved ones extreme states? How should we respond? What helps? What doesn’t help? 

In this two-day workshop, organized by Bay Area Hearing Voices Network and co-sponsored by NAMI East Bay, we invite you to join with other family members and explore compassionate approaches to being present with, understanding, and supporting our loved ones as they experience voices, special messages, and extreme states. Learn tools for coping with extreme experiences as well as gain a better understanding of their meaning and content.

Create hope by learning the power of storytelling and social support. Look at the role of trauma and explore the recovery movement and the role of peer support and social engagement. Learn effective communication strategies for relationship building that help to overcome our helplessness and fear.

Professionals, survivors, and everyone are welcome to attend.

Friday and Saturday, June 5th and 6th First Methodist Church, 980 Stannage St., Albany

10-5, with one hour for lunch
Fees: $100 (some scholarships available)

Lunch on your own at several restaurants nearby. CEU units available

Send checks to: NAMI East Bay, 980 Stannage St., Albany, CA. 94706. For more information contact: edherzog@comcast.net

www.willhall.net; www.familieshealingtogether.com, www.madnessradio.net, www.bayareahearingvoicesnetwork.org

Withdrawing from Psychiatric Medications: A Harm Reduction Approach
Will Hall, Dr. Nazlim Hagmann, & Rebecca Ross
Saturday April 27: 930am-430pm

Psychotropic medications such anti-psychotics, lithium, and benzodiazepines are helpful to many – but for some they can become a dangerous trap. When does a tool itself become the problem, not the solution? Are psychiatric medications necessary to treat brain disorders – or is the reality more complicated? And how can people support each other to explore the possibility of coming off medications, and finding new ways to recover? This pro-choice workshop is based on the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, now translated into 5 languages and used widely in the recovery movement.

Each workshop fee: $135
Enrollment limited to 25: Preregistration required
To register contact: rebeccamross@gmail.com
More program details at www.willhall.net/classes

Will Hall MA, DiplPW, is an internationally recognized therapist and mental diversity trainer who has himself recovered from a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Host of Madness Radio and founder of Portland Hearing Voices, Will’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Best Practices in Mental Health and Modern Community Mental Health Work: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Oxford Press). www.willhall.net

Krista Mackinnon is mental health recovery consultant/trainer/counsellor in the capacities of peer support, street outreach, education, community organizing, and family counselling. Trained in yoga and mindfulness based cognitive therapy, she currently practices and resides in Costa Rica. She is the CEO of www.practicerecovery.com, an innovative online therapeutic education and support community for families that works in partnership with Family Outreach & Response Program (Toronto) and MotherBear CAN (North Carolina).

Nazlim Hagmann MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City. She brings a multicultural background and has many years of experience in public psychiatry sector as a psychiatrist as well as administrator with a critical attitude. She also has knowledge and experience of the mental health insurance world and has been a long time supporter of alternatives as well as peer movement. Currently Nazlim is a second year student at the Institute for Dialogic Practice in Northampton, MA under the guidance of Mary Olson,PhD, and closely collaborates with Rebecca Ross and Will Hall.

Rebecca Ross LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in New York City. She works in a collaborative approach and social network-based model of treating people experiencing crisis with psychiatrist and therapeutic practitioner, Nazlim Hagmann, MD. Rebecca also practices at the Ackerman Institute for the Family where she trains with leading family and couples therapists. She is a student of the Institute for Dialogic Practice under the guidance of Mary Olsen, PhD, and Rebecca received her social work graduate training at Smith College School for Social Work. Her clinical orientation is informed by systems, feminist and narrative approaches to working with life’s problems.

==================================================================

OPEN DIALOGUE FILM: An Alternative, Finnish Approach to
Healing Psychosis

Video Showing And Discussion

Thursday, January 31, 2013
7:30-9:30pm
Free and open to the public

Process Work
Institute, 2049 NW Hoyt St. Portland

Finland once boasted some of Europe’s poorest outcomes for
schizophrenia, but today has the best recovery results in the world.
They turned their system around with an approach called Open Dialogue. Open Dialogue meets clients in crisis immediately and often daily until the crises are resolved. They avoid hospitalization and its consequential stigma, preferring to meet in the homes of those seeking their services. And, perhaps most controversially, they avoid the use of anti-psychotic medication wherever possible. They also work in groups, because they view psychosis as a problem involving relationships.

Open Dialogue is a new way of approaching psychosis that is rich with application in the US: low use of medications, team approach, working with families and relationships, dialogic listening, non-hierarcy and openness among professionals, non-diagnostic language, and expectation of recovery. Come learn about how Open Dialogue helps people and how we can use these approaches in the US.

Daniel Mackler’s 74 Minute film about Open Dialogue will be shown, followed by a discussion led by Will Hall, schizophrenia diagnosis survivor and director of Portland Hearing Voices, who is training with Open Dialogue creator Jaakko Seikkula. (Will is also offering a day long Introduction to Open Dialogue workshop on February 10.)

Co-sponsored by Portland Hearing Voices, Empowerment Initiatives, and the Mental Health Association of Portland.

More info:http://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-mary-olson-open-dialog, http://
beyondmeds.com/2011/03/21/finnishopendialogue/, www.willhall.net/opendialogue

==================================================================

INTRODUCTION TO OPEN DIALOGUE FOR PSYCHOSIS

A Workshop With Will Hall, MA, DiplPW

Sunday, February 10, 2013 10am-4:00pm

$90; Pre-registration recommended

Process Work Institute
2049 NW Hoyt St. Portland OR

info: portlandhearingvoices@gmail.com

CEU’s are available for this workshop

Download flyer here: http://www.portlandhearingvoices.net/files/OpenDialogueIntroductionWorkshop2013.pdf.

Co-Sponsored by Portland Hearing Voices, Mental Health Association of
Portland, and Empowerment Initiatives.

Dr. Jaakko Seikkula and colleagues in Finland have developed “Open Dialogue,” a family network approach to first episode psychosis. Open Dialogue de-emphasizes pharmaceutical intervention and instead establishes a dialogue with the social network and organizes a “treatment meeting” within twenty-four hours. This reduces hospitalization, lowers use of medication, and leads to less recurrance of crisis.

In a five-year follow-up, 83% of patients returned to their jobs or studies and were not receiving government disability, and 77% did not have psychotic symptoms. Open Dialogue is gaining support in the US after Robert Whitaker, in his book Anatomy of An Epidemic, featured it as an effective alternative to the poor treatment outcomes for psychosis
in the US.

Open Dialogue is a new way of approaching psychosis that is rich with application in the US: low use of medications, team approach, working with families and relationships, dialogic listening, non-hierarcy and openness among professionals, non-diagnostic language, and expectation of recovery. Come learn about how Open Dialogue helps people and how we can use these approaches in the US. Similarities with Process Work and other approaches will be addressed, and you will learn new tools to put into practice right away.

Portland Hearing Voices Director, schizophrenia diagnosis survivor, and therapist Will Hall is currently training with Dr. Seikkula and his colleague Dr. Mary Olson in Open Dialogue at the Institute for Dialogic Practice. This introductory workshop with Will provides a basic introduction to Open Dialogue and the concepts behind it. (Open Dialogue is a Finnish hospital clinical method based on 3 years+ training, and this Introduction does not represent the depth of
that method, but instead serves to spark interest in learning more.) This is the third year this popular workshop has been offered in Portland.

A limited number of scholarships are available for this workshop, please contact us.

More info:
http://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-mary-olson-open-dialog, http://
beyondmeds.com/2011/03/21/finnishopendialogue/, www.willhall.net/opendialogue

==================================================================

Understanding
Psychiatric Medications:
A Harm Reduction Approach

with Will Hall MA, Dipl PW

Sunday, October 21, 2012
10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Process Work Institute
2049 NW Hoyt St. Portland, Oregon
$120 ($108 before Oct. 8th)

Space limited; pre-registration recommended
Registration: info@processwork.org
Scholarship info: portlandhearingvoices@gmail.com
CEU’s available for this workshop

Download flyer here: http://www.portlandhearingvoices.net/files/PsychMedicationsWorkshopOct21-2012WillHall.pdf

How can anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, and other drugs be used wisely? What are the risks and benefits? How can we collaborate effectively with prescribers, and what about reducing and discontinuing medications? Come learn a pragmatic harm reduction approach that is neither pro- nor anti- medication, but instead based in mental diversity. Everyone is welcome: professionals, survivors, students, family, and anyone taking or not taking medications.

Will Hall, MA, DiplPW, is a therapist who has himself recovered from a diagnosis of schizophrenia and now teaches internationally. Director of Portland Hearing Voices and host of KBOO’s Madness Radio, Will has written in the Journal of Best Practices in Mental Health and in the upcoming Oxford University Press Modern Community Mental Health Work. He is author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, used widely in the peer recovery movement. https://www.willhall.net.

Co-Sponsored by:
Process Work Institute, Portland Hearing Voices, Mental Health Association of Portland, and Empowerment Initiatives

For more information:
www.processwork.org and www.portlandhearingvoices.net