The Women’s Hearing Voices Group in Manchester is a community peer support group. It is a safe space for women to talk with each other about personal experiences of hearing voices or having other unshared sensory experiences.
About
The group meets twice a month – on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month. The group started June 2023 and has been running regularly with varied attendance between 1 – 6 participants.
People have expressed that joining the group was their first ever experience of being able to talk with others about their experiences.
The group has supported both individuals who are accessing mental heath services and not able to work, as well as people who are working. The latter group are often quite isolated with their experiences, since many supportive services are only available during daytime in the week. . Having a combination of women with different experiences has been helpful to share the diversity of experiences and ways of coping.
It is the general experience in hearing voices peer support groups that attendance ebbs and flow affected by things like the seasons, weather and what is going on in peoples lives. Some people use it to drop in once in a while and other people come regularly for shorter or longer periods. It can take a long time for people who express interest to feel ready to come along and its important that a group is consistently happening so people come to trust that it is available for them when they need it.
We have a mailing list of 10 people and we get new enquiries regularly.
If you have any questions or want more information please get in touch with Elisabeth at womenshvgmanchester@gmail.com If you can, please let us know you planning to come.
How you can help
We would like to readvertise the group but it would be helpful to have certainty around the venue. The group has felt welcome at the Manchester Meeting House and very well looked after by staff. Group participants have expressed appreciation for the style and atmosphere of the room we have been meeting in.
The womens group is part of the Manchester Hearing Voices Network and is supported by CHARM.
CHARM has agreed to pay £20 towards each meeting so £40 a month and we could bring our own teabags but it would be helpful if it was possible to have a flask of hot water and cups.
The Group Meeting Structure
o Arriving – hot drinks, snacks and getting settled
o Check in – we go around and people can share how they are if they want to. Add items to the
agenda
o Go through the agenda together
o Check out
o A comfort break half way through or if and when needed
The facilitators role:
– are there to make it happen
– Take care of access to room, timekeeping, other admin such as emails and communication about the group,
– facilitate conversations and supports the group to do what it wants to do and develop.
Hearing Voices Groups
Hearing Voices Groups are citizen to citizen mutual support spaces that aim to be:
• Peer led and collaborative: The group is centred around the needs and aspirations of members. Decisions about the group are made in the group and all members are equal.
• Respectful: Diversity of experiences and views are welcomed – making space for difference we can learn from each other’s wisdom and expertise.
• Non-judgemental: Creating an accepting; confidential; empathic environment where we listen non-judgementally to each other.
• Empowering: Meeting other women with similar experiences and feeling safe enough to talk about what they are going through can support members to find ways to move beyond stigmatisation and hopelessness that often come with hearing voices. In a peer support group people can experience sense of social belonging and gain self-confidence.
• Flexible: the space is not solely focused on hearing voices or similar experiences so anyone can bring a topic to the space to talk about.
Hearing voices groups are the core of the hearing voices network which is a social justice movement which started in The Netherlands and the UK in the late 1980’ies.
Facilitators
The group is co-facilitated by volunteers Elisabeth Svanholmer and Sherquita Waller.
Elisabeth is a self employed facilitator and organiser of mental health training, peer supervision groups and hearing voices events since 2006. She has lived experience of hearing voices and using mental health sevices.
Sherquita works as an assistant psychologist and has experience from working in forensic psychology, inpatient adult mental and with children and young people in the community with CAMHS. She is also involved in Let’s Face Change which is a group that puts on conferences and delivers training to raise awareness of and address ethnic and racial inequalities in psychology and mental health.
