Recovery Michigan

How to Live Successfully When You Hear Voices by Karen Taylor Working to Recovery (WTR) has always specialized in working with people who hear voices. In this article, Karen Taylor, who has a background in psychiatric nursing, describes the organization’s approach to working with people who hear voices and how WTR helps people recover their lives and live with their voices.

Can you hear voices and be healthy? Can people who hear overwhelming and distressing voices be helped to find ways to live successfully with their voices? Over the past 20 years, research and practice originating in Europe and developed in partnership with voice hearers indicate that this is indeed the case.

This empowering approach to assisting people—both adults and children—who hear voices and are distressed by them starts from the premise that voices are related to real feelings and emotions that need to be investigated and understood. Therefore, voices need to be accepted as a part of oneself rather than eradicated. This perspective has made a significant impact on the way voice hearers and mental health services regard the voice experience, leading to the development of a vigorous peer support network and important changes in the practice and treatments offered by service providers.

Millions of people with severe, treatment-resistant depression could get their lives back by adding an anti-inflammatory drug such as aspirin to their anti-depressant medication, a leading consortium of UK researchers in biological psychiatry, the Psychiatric Research into Inflammation, Immunity and Mood Effects (PRIME), reported at the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Brighton.

Dr Carmine Pariante, Reader in Biological Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London, told the Congress that a series of studies published over the last five years now provides sufficiently clear evidence to justify the use of anti inflammatory drugs alongside antidepressant medication.

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Our experiences and our trauma cannot be the definition of who we are when we are in a like-minded group. Being in the presence of those who share a common bond allows us to become our own people and to realize that the abuse does not define us, it is merely a part of us.

oday, on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Day, we recognize the millions of Americans who suffer from this debilitating condition. PTSD affects a wide range of people, from new mothers to our country's service men and women.

While everyone experiences anger, the extent to which it is useful and justified makes all the difference. Using anger to your advantage can make a profoundly positive difference in your life. Anger may be inevitable, but it doesn't have to hinder your recovery.  —Stephen Propst, Making the Most of Anger. Spring 2006

Asylum magazine is a forum for free debate, open to anyone with an interest in psychiatry or mental health. We especially welcome contributions from service users or ex-users (or survivors), carers, and frontline psychiatric or mental health workers (anonymously, if you wish). The magazine is not-for-profit and run by a collective of unpaid volunteers. Asylum Collective is open to anyone who wants to help produce and develop the magazine, working in a spirit of equality.

UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists are shedding new light on why the anesthetic drug ketamine produces a fast-acting antidepressant response in patients with treatment-resistant depression.

The drug's robust effect at low doses as a fast-acting antidepressant potentially has use in emergency rooms with high-risk patients.

"Ketamine produces a very sharp increase that immediately relieves depression," said Dr. Lisa Monteggia, associate professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study published June 15 in Nature.

The study demonstrates that when a weak electrical current is applied over the front of participants' scalps for ten minutes, it greatly improved their ability to process responses -- effectively jumpstarting the brain's ability to control impulsivity. The treatment has the potential to serve as a non invasive treatment for patients with conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Tourette's syndrome, drug addictions, or violent impulsivity

I envision a fashionably presentable hat!

The 223 patient study was presented today at NCDEU, a scientific congress sponsored by the American Society of Psychopharmacology, meeting in Boca Raton this week. This study supports the growing the body of evidence for the metabolic management of major depressive disorder with Deplin® (L-methylfolate), a medical food, administered in combination with antidepressants.1

Why can't a person just take folate without the prescription?