Embodiment and Voice Hearing

Abstract

This article will reflect on almost twenty five years of working on issues that the phenomenon of voice hearing present to scholars interested in embodiment and mental health. My interests stem from my personal experience of living and growing up with a mother diagnosed with severe mental health difficulties, and how my understandings have developed from my long-standing collaborations with the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). The article is situated within issues that emerge from British psychiatric culture, but I hope that the reflections will provide important sites, links, concepts and practices that might help those working in the area of body studies within more transnational contexts to further shape and develop their own analytic and critical practices. The discussion will centre on the practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology and specifically the phenomenon of voice hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of bio-psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production and transformation of subjectivity.