Voices' use of gender, race and other social categories to undermine female voice-hearers: Implications for incorporating intersectionality within CBT for psychosis and other psychological interventions

Intersectionality, a framework recently advanced in psychology, examines the joint impact of multiple forms of marginalisation on well-being. To date, this approach has not been applied to psychosis despite the well-documented... [ view full abstract ]

Intersectionality, a framework recently advanced in psychology, examines the joint impact of multiple forms of marginalisation on well-being. To date, this approach has not been applied to psychosis despite the well-documented links of social inequality and risk of developing psychotic experiences. We adopted it to develop a codebook for analysing the voice content of 44 women diagnosed with schizophrenia for the ways in which social categories are drawn on to undermine and/or affirm voice-hearers. Over half of the sample included women with ethnic-minority status. Gendered conditions of worth were used by voices to undermine by far the majority (40) of women and racialised conditions of worth over half (14) the ethnic-minority women. We concluded that voice content often reflects social categories and structural inequalities in society. This workshop will examine how incorporating intersectionality to understanding and working with voice content within CBT for psychosis (and other psychological approaches) aims to provide more responsive interventions for marginalized groups, particularly by critically engaging with systemic injustices and power relations. I will explain how intersectionality was a useful lens for analysis and discuss findings from this research that was published in Psychosis (Haarmans, Vass, & Bentall, 2016). Following this there will be plenty of opportunity to bring our own experiences of [working with people with] distressing voices. Specifically, we will explore ways of using the codebook for enhancing psychological formulations, understanding and working with the meaning of voice content and the power relationship between voice and voice-hearer. This workshop will be of particular interest to practitioners working in psychosis and voice-hearers.