In the month of October, there have been some exciting developments in the local efforts to make hearing voices groups available to the public. HVN-USA is coming out to San Francisco to provide a three-day training for twenty-five individuals, including several people who have been attending groups in East Oakland where I provide a free group to the public.
I am hoping to create a second training for the licensed professional who we would have to have pay to obtain CEU Credits. This would be hosted by PEERS and train an additional ten peers who could then mix with professional and offer groups at local agencies. This would help us recreate the services we provided in the special messages project throughout the county. The vision of having groups with a professional and a person with lived experience within the system to transition people into HVN Groups is alive and well.
In October, I provided a two-hour training at La Chiem Outpatient Program in Oakland and got an invite back in December to complete the training. This spurred me to spend a weekend or two improving my presentation so that I could present it for a six-hour CEU class for providers. I am now hoping to not only take the HVN training but to learn how my training which reconstructs a new definition of psychosis may compliment it.
Getting more people trained and working on outreach at PEERS may give me a chance to use my work to provide ongoing training to help peers in their outreach efforts.
In the meantime, I have been able to initiate peer services at my job at Highland Hospital and will be hosting two peer interns to see if more people with lived experience can complement and improve our services. I have been working on preparing to host these interns and in the process of hiring them. This also has been a dream of mine
I also have paid to pretty-up my blog and fixed a bug in a plugin and now can officially sell books from my website. Thus, I am going to slash the price of my memoir to twelve dollars in case any of my followers want to purchase new second edition copies.
In the midst of this I have published two blog posts this month that may be worth checking out:
Demystifying Complex Trauma for Therapists
I Wash My Hands in the Muddy Waters of the Mental Health System
