Maastricht Interview:
A Social & Biographical Approach to Hearing Voices

 The chair of the National Paranoia Network, Pete Bullimore, is testament to how effective accepting and working with voices and paranoia can be. Pete heard his first voice when he was aged seven. "I heard a child's voice telling me to keep going, that everything would be OK. It was reassuring, a bit like an imaginary friend," he says. But as bad things happened in my life the voices increased in number, eventually turning sinister and aggressive. "They told me to set myself on fire, to slash myself and destroy myself, often 20 or 30 voices all shouting at me at once," he says. By his mid-twenties Pete had lost his business, his family, his home, everything. "The voices just encompassed my life; I curled up in a chair and didn't wash or eat. "I was locked in a world of voices, paranoia and depression, and it was probably the most frightening time of my life," he says. Pete spent more than a decade after that on heavy medication, but the voices never went away. He had to get out of the psychiatric system to recover. It was only when he came off the medication and met people who share his experiences at the hearing voices network that he was able to stop being so afraid of the voices and actually start listening to them. He changed his relationship with his voices and worked through the meaning of his voices and paranoia.  He now runs his own training and consultancies agencies the National Paranoia Network, Asylum Associates & the Sheffield Hearing Voices Network delivering training on hearing voices, childhood trauma, paranoia and how to use the Maastricht interview for hearing voices & problematic thoughts, beliefs and paranoia internationally. He is a guest lecturer at fifteen Universities in the UK. He has set up Maastricht Centre’s at the Radbone unit in Derby and the Hartington unit in Chesterfield in collaboration with Derby NHS trust; he has now launched a Maastricht Approach center in Bradford and a National Maastricht Center in Telford. "I wouldn't want to get rid of my voices now, they're part of me," he says.