ABSTRACT
The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM), which has existed for more than 25 years in the UK, 12 years in Denmark, and can be found in more than 30 other countries, was inspired by the innovative research of Marius Romme and Sandra Escher. HMV is a protest movement against the dominant psychiatric paradigm that states that hearing voices and having other unusual experiences is a primary symptom of schizophrenia. In readers experience as voice hearers, and as Busch states, the voice-hearing groups work because they strip away the dominant power structures found within psychiatry, and offer a space of true safety and normalisation. The HVM challenges this by introducing the meaningfulness of life stories and the consequences of trauma as evidence that the label of 'illness' is untenable. The recovery philosophy is based on the uniqueness of the individual, and therefore recovery for some will mean recovering from an illness, whereas for others, recovery is recovering from psychiatry.
