Resources
Flyers
Our staff flyers detail who can be referred, what the referral process is, and what happens after a referral.
Our patient flyers detail, if you are a patient, how you can be referred to the Voices Clinic and what happens next.
Please download the relevant flyer below.
Adur, Arun and Worthing
Staff flyer
Patient flyer
Eastbourne
Staff flyer
Patient flyer
East Sussex CAMHS
Staff flyer
Patient flyer
High Weald, Lewes and Havens
Staff flyer
Patient flyer
Western
Staff flyer
Patient flyer
Resources to Support Learning
1. Choices app
Choices for Voices is a tool to support the management of distressing voice hearing experiences. Developed by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Choices for Voices aims to support the continued use of strategies that have been learnt within Sussex Voices Clinic. Regular use of these strategies can help people to live well despite the continued presence of voice hearing experiences.
The app supports learning when patients leave the clinic and can help with coping strategies, assertive responding and core beliefs and voices beliefs. It can also be adapted to reflect the specific learning requirements of individual patients.
The app is available for anyone to download and use.
Click here to see our guide on how to use the Choices app
Download for an Android device
2. Overcoming Distressing Voices book
Although the causes of voice hearing are many and varied, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has been found to be a highly effective treatment for distressing voices. CBT can provide a powerful and positive way of coping with distressing voices, helping people to live well, even though the voice hearing may continue.
This book is a practical self-help guide, using clinically proven techniques, for managing distressing voice hearing experiences. It was written by Mark Hayward and colleagues, and offers strategies similar to those used in the Voices Clinic therapy.
Overcoming Distressing Voices, 2nd Edition is available to buy using the link below.
It includes:
- Clear explanations of what distressing voices are and what causes them
- Techniques to explore and re-evaluate the links between self-esteem, beliefs about voices and feelings
- Practical steps to reduce the distress that hearing voices can cause
- Consideration of the impact on friends, family and advice for how they can help
Overcoming Distressing Voices book
3. Coping therapy workbook
Using coping strategies is one way of helping people manage their voices. Coping strategies can help make voices less distressing and help people feel more in control and be able to get on with our lives.
People may already use coping strategies without being aware of it.
Coping strategy enhancement is focused on exploring people's coping strategies for voices hearing. The aim is to help patients identify helpful coping strategies and use these as consistently and effectively as possible.
The workbook provides an introduction to coping strategy enhancement. It also contains worksheets.
Please download a copy of the coping therapy workbook, or read the research paper.
Other support
1. Hearing Voices Network
The Hearing Voices Network (HVN) aims to:
- "Raise awareness of voice hearing, visions, tactile sensations and other sensory experiences"
- "Give men, women and children who have these experiences an opportunity to talk freely about this together"
- "Support anyone with these experiences seeking to understand, learn and grow from them in their own way"
Please visit the Hearing Voices website to explore their information about voices and resources, including free downloads.
The HVN is made up of 180 groups across the UK. They also run worldwide.
These groups allow people with lived experience of hearing voices to support each other. They are a safe space for people to share experiences and to support one another. The groups are based on self-help and peer support, and do not involve therapy or treatment.
In Sussex HVN run groups in Brighton, Bognor and Worthing.
2. Recovery College
The Recovery College offers short courses for people who experience mental distress, their families and carers and clinicians.
All the courses are run by someone with lived experience and a clinician.
Recovery College courses have included: ‘Increasing your self-esteem and being more confident’ ‘Understanding Psychosis’, amongst many others.
3. Other clinics
We work closely with the Voices Clinics in Perth and Melbourne.
4. Webinar presentation
'Don’t react! Choose How to Relate to Distressing Voices, with Mark Hayward'.
There has recently been a shift from conceptualizing a voice as a sensory stimulus that the hearer holds beliefs about, to a voice as a person-like stimulus which the hearer has a relationship with. Understanding voice hearing experiences within relational frameworks has resulted in the development of psychological therapies that focus upon the experience of relating to and with distressing voices.
This presentation explores lessons learnt from the development, experience and evaluation of one of these therapies – Relating Therapy. These lessons are located within the broader context of other relationally-based therapies that seek to support recovery through the use of digital enhancement (Avatar Therapy) and dynamic interaction with voices (Talking with Voices).
Sussex Voices Clinic in the news
1. Is it possible to reduce the distress associated with voice-hearing?
Professor Mark Hayward answers questions posed to him about voice-hearing and treating auditory hallucinations for Psychwire ASK. Mark, clinical psychologist, Research Director at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Director of Sussex Voices Clinic, was selected as an expert in voice hearing experiences within the ASK programme.
Can patients learn to accept their voice hearing experiences?
Will successful therapy remove the experience of distressing voices entirely?
Does the stigma around hearing voices influence the approach to therapy?
See the answers to these and other questions here
This will help build a fantastic resource for the general public and health professionals worldwide.
2. Experts and service users from Sussex share experiences of hearing voices
Two research participants who hear voices have co-written a chapter in a new book focusing on voice-hearing along with Professor Mark Hayward, Director of the Sussex Voices Clinic.
The Practical Handbook Of Hearing Voices: Therapeutic And Creative Approaches includes chapters written by Professor Mark Hayward, Director of Research and Development at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, who writes from a clinical perspective and Angie Culham and Sheila Evenden, participants in therapy for voice-hearing. See the news release here.
3. Mental Health today
See an article about the Voices Clinic in Mental Health Today.
4. BBC News
A film made by Mark Norman for BBC South East with Professor Mark Hayward:
- What’s it like to live with voices?
- How to live with them and relate to them
- Views of people who have taken part in Voices Clinic therapy
5. Twitter
See tweets by Sussex Voices Clinic: latest news, research news, events, training and more...
Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP)
The Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) for SussexVoices Clinic is a group of people with experience of hearing voices who support the work of the clinic. It is co-led by Lucy Walsh and Angie Culham.
The group meet two or three times a year and help the clinicians and researchers improve the service and develop research about voice-hearing.
Some of the things the group have helped out with are; improving the website, making information clearer and helping the clinic to be as friendly as possible.
If you are interested in finding out more about this group you can contact us on E: voices.clinic@sussexpartnership.nhs.uk
We can then arrange for you to talk to someone who can tell you about the group and how you could contribute.
