On Thursday, April 5, from 9:30am to 4:30pm, Durham Mental Health Services is pleased to host Kevin Healey’s “Accepting Voices for Families” workshop.

This workshop will enable participants to:

• Understand hearing voices as a normal human experience, maybe not shared by everyone, but part of what it means to be human.
• Look within your own experience and relate with different experiences like hearing voices and others that get called “psychosis”
• Explore how you can work more easily and be more real, more human, with people who hear voices.

Workshop developer and facilitator Kevin Healey explains “Difficult-to-hear voices are connected with difficult-to-feel-emotions and with difficult-life-experiences in ways that are uniquely personal, intimate and can be unbearably painful. Difficult-to-hear voices speak to the pain we hold inside, because we don’t yet have the language  to talk about it in ways that others are ready to hear. This workshop helps participants become more competent and confident in working with individuals who experience voices.”

DMHS Family Support Community Mental Health Worker Denise Gould says, “I value Kevin’s perspective so much because it normalizes the idea of hearing voices and identifies it as a human experience rather than a clinical one.  It encourages people to re-frame their ideas about hearing voices, which can lead to empowering new perspectives.”

DMHS Peer Support Manager Aubrey Andrus says, “Through Kevin’s comfort with the topic of voices and his courage in bringing discussion of them out into the open, I gained insights that help me better relate to, understand and support individuals who experience voices, so I can meet them where they are at.”

For more information or to register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/acceptingvoices-4-families-whitby-tickets-42384369791.