‘In the same boat, helping each other’: a grounded theory of growth and emancipation in peer-led hearing voices groups

In this project, I present a grounded theory of how peer-led Hearing Voices Network Groups (HVNGs) impact people who attend them. By conducting intensive interviews and attending groups as an observer, I developed a theory of the outcomes and processes of change that people experience in peer-led HVNGs. I used member-checking (Charmaz, 2014) to make sure my analysis was consistent with the experience of people who took part. Through this considered and thorough process of conversation and collaboration with people who hear voices, I have developed a theory grounded in the knowledge and insight of people’s lived-experience of HVNGs. HVNGs provide support that is fundamental to the well-being of people who attend them. Therefore research in this area has the potential to impact people’s lives by contributing not only to the growing evidence base regarding the benefit of HVNGs, but also by understanding how this benefit is achieved. Based on my analysis, I have theorised that the impact of hearing voices groups includes fundamental shifts in i) how voices and the voice-hearing experience are understood, ii) the sense of agency in their lives, and iii) an enhanced sense of valuing oneself and others, developed through sharing mutual support (the experience of ‘being in the same boat, helping each other’). In order to understand the impact of hearing voices groups, I also consider the voice-hearing experience (Blackman, 2001) as a whole. Based on my data, I conceptualise this as a holistic experience that includes perceptual/sensory, social and meaning-making/agentic factors. I consider the stigma, loss of agency and confusion of meaning that can attend negative voice-hearing experiences in relation to trauma research, as well as other approaches. The contribution of this research to the field of counselling psychology and psychological therapies is the creation of a theory of what voice-hearers value and experience in peer-led HVNGs. This research represents the first attempt at a full theory construction of this topic using an accepted methodology. Theory creation in this area is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, since hearing voices groups represent an increasingly popular approach both within NHS Trusts and other settings, it is increasingly necessary to understand the processes and mechanisms of change in these groups. Secondly, without basing theory construction on the actual experiences of people who hear voices, research in this area is susceptible to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Finally, insight into the experience of hearing voices and how peer-led hearing voices groups address this experience can inform work in the wider field of hearing-voices research

The path to which wild error leads: A Lucretian Comedy of Errors

Disrupting the causal progress of his comic design, Shakespeare's narrative swerve introduces the accidental into a teleological plot, allowing the errancy of individual will while promoting new energetic narrative structure. Offering a Lucretian reading of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, I consider how the playwright's complex association of identity, chance, and genre can be informed by philosophical atomism, approached along the trajectory of a readerly clinamen

Human Rights, Women, and Third World Development

As part of the effort to inaugurate a new international socio-political order after World War II, international emphasis was given to certain moral and legal entitlements we have come to call human rights. That emphasis initially found its most forceful expression in the Charter of the United Nations, which not only asserts its members\u27 faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, as well as in the equal rights of men and women of all nations, but also recites its members\u27 commitment to employ international machinery for the promotion of the social and economic advancement of all peoples. Indeed, whille assigning the General Assembly of the U.N. the task of conducting studies and making recommendations pursuant to the realization its purposes, the Charter also commits the U.N. as a whole-- with a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations --to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedom. Specific organs are then called upon to tender advice on the mode as well as the means by which the promotion is to be effected, and pledges are secured from member states to take joint and separate action, in cooperation with the U.N. to create the sought-after conditions of social stability and well-being. It is in large measure due to the assumed international obligation to take joint and separate action that, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was proclaimed and adopted, followed by the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as that on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights--two international instruments that spell out specific human rights in accordance with the agreed-on, common standard represented by and elaborated in the UDHR. It is to that assumed obligation, too, that we owe certain regional, human rights instruments such as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), the American Convention on Human Rights (1969), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples\u27 Rights, officially named after the Gambian city where it was completed, the Banjul Charter on Human and Peoples\u27 Rights (1981). Despite the preceding measures taken on the regional and global level to promote and encourage respect for human rights, hardly a day goes by without our hearing or reading news of their violation or otherwise gaining information raising questions about the commitment of some nation-state to them. One particular area of violation and questionable commitment on the part of states that is frequently overlooked, however, is an area intimately linked to the norm of equality and nondiscrimination--the very starting point of all our liberties. That area concerns women

The United Nations and the Magna Carta for Children

The impulse that invited the preparation of this book is one which is linked to the convergence of a number of factors bearing on my interest in human rights. First, the brutality visited on children during World War II has had an abiding negative effect on my sense of what is possible in human conduct. Second, I am persuaded that children are not simply the means by which human societies are continued, but, as well, the potential source of moral revitalization and transformation for those societies. Third, I recognize that the human rights movement, which followed World War II, holds in it a profound promise that of humanity consciously co-existing as a single people, indeed, as a single family within which children, who are most deserving of our reverence and tenderness, will not be desecrated by hatred. Fourth, my coming to understand that the emergence of the rights of children, as a major part of the human rights movement, carries with it a twin danger — that the rights of children might be interpreted as reduction of the power, authority, and rights of parents; and, as a reaction to that flawed interpretation, a parents-led backlash against children\u27s rights might develop. Fifth, the conviction I gradually gained as I reviewed the history of efforts to offer children protection and rights within the existing international system, that, despite all that has been said and written about children\u27s rights, not much has been done to help people really understand the singular nature of the development that took place in 1989, when the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Principal aim of this work is to help judges, social workers, lawyers, physicians, police, parents, political leaders, children (especially those entering adolescence), teachers, guidance counselors, professors, journalists, and, certainly, the wider, lettered public understand the significance of this Magna Carta for Children. A secondary aim is to provide readers with a documentary source through which they can grapple with some of the conflicts, cultural blind-spots, moral ambiguities, and self-interests that accompanied and has followed, the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I hope the volume has achieved its aims

Foreword

Change is a fundamental feature of life and living; without it, few things would survive, and fewer, if any, would thrive. The New England Journal of Public Policy has undergone a change, having elected to assume an electronic form. Since coming into being in this form three months ago, the success it has realized with its earlier issues has been remarkable. It is as if it were being waited on. In the month of December 2012, for example, the journal was the second most popular publication series on ScholarWorks at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with a total of 2,783 downloads. To date, (just over three months), the 600 publications that make up the run of the NEJPP have been downloaded 17,116 times. And so it should be. The journal\u27s name, which represents the site from which it is published, is belied by the variety of issue areas it comprehends; the local, national, and international emphasis of its coverage, and the global character of its interests and concerns, as well as the global nature of the leadership the person who edited it for some 25 years, Padraig O\u27Malley, the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, has exhibited. It would be accurate to state that the journal is pan-human in its orientation and commitments

Resonances, radiation pressure and optical scattering phenomena of drops and bubbles

Acoustic levitation and the response of fluid spheres to spherical harmonic projections of the radiation pressure are described. Simplified discussions of the projections are given. A relationship between the tangential radiation stress and the Konstantinov effect is introduced and fundamental streaming patterns for drops are predicted. Experiments on the forced shape oscillation of drops are described and photographs of drop fission are displayed. Photographs of critical angle and glory scattering by bubbles and rainbow scattering by drops are displayed