Claire holds trauma-based understandings of the vulnerabilities that led to her three extended departures from consensus reality, and spiritual, familial, and social understandings of the forces that helped guide her through extreme states, allowing her to turn back to the world, and find/re-find herself and her life without the need for medication, even while continuing to hear voices. Her goal in doing this work is to help de-pathologize the voice-hearing experience and increase understanding that it is the social conditions of our lives, and the unresolved feelings we have when relationships go awry, that most profoundly affect people’s ability to live fully, and with dignity, in the world. 

Claire's address will include a discussion of the many shared perspectives between the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) and ISPS, and reflections on the ways in those perspectives have deepened her understanding of her voice-hearing and other unusual experiences, helping to reinforce the foundation on which she has built her continuing, unmedicated recovery.