Voices: The Maastricht Approach

TLDR: This approach has become progressively more influential, in Europe, Australia, NewZealand and elsewhere, and has led to voice hearers organizing themselves into networks, empowering themselves and working towards recovery in their own ways as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: This approach has become progressively more influential, in Europe, Australia, NewZealand and elsewhere, and has led to voice hearers organizing themselves into networks,empowering themselves and working towards recovery in their own ways.This approach contends that people hearing voices (hereafter referred to as ‘VH’ for‘voice hearers’) can learn to cope with their voices and benefit from psychological andsocial interventions. It is based on three central tenets, that the phenomena of hearingvoices is: (a) more prevalent in the general population than was previously believed, (b)a personal reaction to life stresses, whose meaning or purpose can be deciphered, and(c) best considered a dissociative experience and not a psychotic symptom (though it cansometimes occur in the context of psychotic symptoms, such as delusions; Moskowitzand Corstens, 2007). In addition to emphasizing understanding the purpose or meaningof the voices, a specific treatment model for working directly with a person’s voices –emphasizing their dissociative nature – has been developed by adapting the voice dialoguemethod (Stone and Stone, 1989) for working with VH.