One is that nurses are still afraid to talk openly to people about hearing voices it is as if they feel that doing so will open a Pandora’s box. If these simple coping strategies provide such a good opportunity to introduce people who hear voices to psychological treatment, why do mental health professionals not encourage the use of them? There may be two particular reasons. There is a clear evidence-base in psychological therapy for using symptom-specific interventions, as they routinely form part of CBT (Nelson, 1997), humanistic counselling (Knudson and Coyle, 1999) and approaches that are based on social psychiatry (Romme and Escher, 2000). The most common form of psychological treatment is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) (British Psychological Society, 2000), and NICE has recently decreed that anyone with persistent psychotic symptoms should be offered CBT (NICE, 2002). Psychological treatmentsĪccording to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), psychological treatments for psychosis ‘should be an indispensable part of the treatment options available for service-users’ (NICE, 2002). The strategies described in this article are practical and effective, and can be used even in a chaotic acute environment. There is a range of simple psychological interventions that can be used to help people who hear voices, yet somehow such techniques seem to be rarely used by mental health nurses. It is the role of professionals to help them (Knudson and Coyle, 1999). Research has found high levels of distress among people who have limited control over the voices and few coping strategies (Nayani and David, 1996). Many mental health nurses find themselves caring for people troubled by voices. Charlie Place, RMN, is community mental health nurse, South Leeds Intensive Home Treatment Team, Leeds Mental Health Trust
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