Hearing voices groups

Hearing voices groups are a form of group psychotherapy based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and intended to help people who hear voices as an auditory hallucination. Some groups may have be aimed at people who have been diagnosed as having a psychosis while others will have a more varied intake reflecting the incidence of the phenomena in the general population.

Cognitive behavioural Therapy has been shown to reduce both the frequency of voices and the distress caused by them in a small trial carried out by McLeod, T., et al(2007).

The control that hallucinatory voices exert over clients behavior has been shown to be significantly reduced by cognitive behaviour therapy delivered in a group setting by Chadwick,et al (2000) .Who also demonstrate that this was principally achieved by modifying clients beliefs about the identity, intent and power of the voices.

It has been shown by Wykes et al (2005) <ref.Wykes, T., Hayward, P., Thomas, N., Green, N., Surguladze, S., Fannon, D. and Landau, S. (2005), “What are the effects of group cognitive behaviour therapy for voices? A randomised control trial”, Schizophrenia Research, Vol.77, No. 2-3, pp. 201– 210. that the distress caused by hallucinatory voices can be reduced much more easily than the actual presence of voices and according to Wykes, T. (2004), given the large number of clients whose voices are resistant to medication either partially or totally there is a strong need for the development of group treatments.