Mike Smith 0
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Dr Mike Smith RMN, B.Sc. MA. Ph.D. is a trainer; a mental health professional with 24 years international experience. He has developed many alternative approaches to understanding and helping mental distress, has authored many books and publications on these subjects and is a former UK Nurse of the year for his work & research in developing new practical approaches to self harm, voice hearing and Psychic distress. Mike was also awarded the Bethlem & Maudsley 750th anniversary award for the advancement of mental health care.
From The Guardian (UK), 21/11/2006
"When Mike Smith trained as a mental health nurse in the early 1980s, he was told to deny the existence of the voices that patients reported they heard. His trainers argued it was potentially dangerous to give meaning to what psychiatry regarded as auditory hallucinations. At the very least, staff risked hindering their clients' recovery by encouraging such delusions.
But Mr Smith found this approach increasingly frustrating. "Our clients' experiences were not real and they were not to be discussed," he recalls. "So I could be working with a someone for years and still have no idea what they were hearing. Yet according to the World Health Organisation only 33% of people with schizophrenia recover as a result of medication."
Then in 1993 the psychiatric nurse attended a conference organised by self-help group the Hearing Voices Network, where Dutch psychiatrist Professor Marius Romme and researcher Sandra Escher explained how helping patients to talk back to their voices could aid their recovery."
Read the rest of the Guardian story of one professionals conversion
Visit Mike Smiths website
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