Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Conference

Psychosis spectrum experiences (PSE), including hearing voices, are too often understood only through a deficit-based, symptom-focused lens — one that centers medication, underemphasizes relational approaches, and leaves little room for the perspectives of people who live with these experiences. This session presents a co-developed, peer-and-clinician framework for serving voice-hearers, their families, and the professionals who support them, grounded in a strengths-based reframing of psychosis as part of the natural diversity of human experience.
Drawing on the presenters' collaborative active-learning toolkit, Reframing Psychosis Spectrum Experiences, the session introduces relational strategies as well as practical tools for approaching voice content, including command voices.  
Key insights include: relationships with voices are dynamic and can shift through boundary-setting and other concrete strategies, not just suppression; most commanding voices are non-violent, and the relationship between command content and behavior is shaped by belief, relationship, and perceived consequence rather than the command itself; and integrating peer expertise alongside clinical training produces more compassionate, more accurate, and more resilient systems of support.
This session models the conference's commitment to lived experience as expertise by centering a peer specialist as co-author and co-presenter throughout, offering attendees a practical, replicable template for collaborative knowledge-building between communities and systems of care — and concrete tools they can use immediately in clinical, peer, or family-support settings.