EFTA Conversation: Hearing Voices in Context: Lived Experience, Family Perspectives and Systemic Practice

with Lykourgos Karatzaferis, Peter Bullimore, Katerina Kouni, Ismini Savvala

Chairperson: Umberta Telfener

This presentation offers a dialogical exploration of the Hearing Voices approach and the work of the Hearing Voices Network, bringing into conversation lived experience, family perspectives, and systemic reflection. In keeping with the spirit of the EFTA Conversations, the aim is not simply to deliver a formal presentation, but to create a space for exchange, inquiry, and shared meaning-making.
At the heart of the presentation will be the contribution of multiple voices. A voice-hearer will speak from lived experience, reflecting on what it means to live with voices and on the importance of contexts in which such experiences can be spoken about with dignity, openness, and without immediate pathologisation. Alongside this, members of a family and friends group will offer the perspective of close others, whose own journeys often involve uncertainty, emotional burden, and the gradual discovery of more relational and supportive ways of understanding voice hearing.
The presentation will also consider how systemic theory and practice can make a meaningful contribution to this field. From a systemic perspective, hearing voices may be approached not as an isolated symptom, but as an experience embedded in relationships, personal histories, trauma, social worlds, and cultural meanings. Such a perspective invites curiosity rather than certainty, dialogue rather than reduction, and collaboration rather than expert-driven interpretation.
Systemic practice can therefore support voice-hearers and their networks by fostering relational reflexivity, non-pathologising conversations, and the co-construction of meanings that allow new relationships with voices to emerge.
By weaving together lived experience, family voices, and systemic understanding, this presentation seeks to open a humane and thoughtful conversation on hearing voices as an experience that is profoundly relational, contextual, and deeply connected to community.

Lykourgos Karatzaferis is a psychiatrist and systemic practitioner with postgraduate training in mental health promotion and prevention, and further training in innovative approaches to psychotic experiences, including hearing voices, paranoia, the Maastricht Interview, and voice dialogue. He is a co-founder of the Greek Hearing Voices Network and of the social cooperative Psyhi, Logos, Epikoinonia. His clinical, training, and activist work focuses on hearing voices, crisis, recovery, and community-based, non-pathologising approaches to mental health.

Peter Bullimore is a leading figure in the international Hearing Voices Movement and a trainer and consultant specialising in hearing voices, childhood trauma, paranoia, and the Maastricht Interview. He runs the National Paranoia Network, Asylum Associates, and the Sheffield Hearing Voices Network. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and has lectured at universities across the UK and Ireland. Peter is the author of Making Sense of Paranoia and has contributed extensively to books, training, and advocacy aimed at transforming how voices, trauma, and paranoia are understood.

Katerina Kouni is a theatre scholar and systemic therapist, currently studying Counselling Psychology as well as Theatre, Society and Education. She has been an active member of the Hearing Voices Network Greece for the past six years, participating in friends’ and relatives’ peer groups and helping to facilitate peer support groups. She has also taken part in talks, presentations, and educational seminars on mental health. She is a member of the network’s theatre group, where creative and relational ways of sharing experience and listening to one another are explored.

Ismini Savvala has been an active member of the Hearing Voices Network Greece for 14 years, as part of the friends’ and relatives’ self-help groups. In recent years, she has participated in seminars and talks on mental health from the perspective of the chosen-role caretaker and has facilitated both in-person and online self-help groups. Her involvement reflects a strong interest in systemic thinking, dialogue, and relational approaches to care, as well as an ongoing commitment to collective processes of understanding, support, and reflection.
 

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