I’ve just arrived in beautiful Prague today.  I’ll be presenting an online keynote and workshop at the International Hearing Voices Congress 2025 for Intervoice Day on the 9th Oct. You are welcome to attend that day online for free by contacting Kellie Stastny (Chair of Intervoice) at her email: kelnco87@gmail.com.

I haven’t been to a Hearing Voices Congress since 2013 when it was held in Melbourne. Back then I presented Introducing Multiplicity explaining the different ways people experience voice hearing, dissociation, and multiplicity/plurality, and a second talk about using the Hearing Voices peer based group model to support people with other experiences with my co-presenter Jenny who passed away recently. We used to facilitate the local hearing voices group Sound Minds together.

This time the conference is themed around the topic of supporting young people. I’ll be delivering a keynote called Gary: supporting young people with complicated minds, and then in the afternoon holding space in a workshop about finding hope when supporting people with ’embodied voices’ – all kinds of multiplicity and plurality. 

I used to exclusively support adults in the community services sector, but NDIS has brought me into contact with many families, children, and young adults over the past 5 years, and as a parent of 5 kids, and someone who was themselves a ‘Complex’, ‘at risk’ kid, I’ve learned a lot. There’s always so much more to learn, but I also recognise that a child who hears voices or switches between different personalities is for most people so far outside of their comfort zone they don’t know where to start. I certainly don’t have all the answers but I do know where to start.

I was once that strange child who felt possessed. I’m still ‘possessed’ in that we’re still multiple/plural, we’ve grown up but we’re still a group. We are married and own a house and raise our children and run a business and employ a team of people. I have supported other people and families and witnessed from afar even more people finding good lives. It isn’t hopeless and it doesn’t have to stay scary.

So, I’ve created a collection of new ink paintings in purple and black ink and put them into a powerpoint, printed out a stack of Welcome Packs about multiplicity and dissociation, brought warmer trousers and packed melatonin and sensory items.

I’m so looking forward to meeting familiar faces again and getting to know some new people. This movement is precious and they sheltered me when everyone else rejected me. They saw capacity when everyone else was consumed by my limitations. They welcomed me to grow in the local group and then use it as the fertile soil in which to plant my own strange ideas and grow resources for others out there on the margins who were also excluded and alone. They’re messy and imperfect and certainly not a Utopia in any way, but their values are excellent and the observations and knowledge and hope they hold for people written off as crazy and doomed is unparalleled.

It’s a big deal to come here, it’s expensive and time consuming and it means a week without my family, with my beautiful wife holding the fort with the kids and the business. We talked about it for months, going back and forth about the value of it and the cost and the potential risks. During that time, we also had 4 funerals over 5 weeks, one of them Jenny’s. She was an unfailingly kind soul, who welcomed everyone and spent years spreading her story of acceptance and hope. I carry that story with me, alongside so many others.

Nightingale and I found ourselves asking what we will have wished we had done with them if we knew we only had a year or two left ourselves? Our children are our world and everything is wrapped around our family, as it should be in our circumstances. But my world pre and post covid looks vastly different and I am aware of the losses, the things I used to do and the voice I used to use. Movements struggle when people can’t show up for them. Nightingale and I keep coming back to this – finding safe and accessible ways to share this kind of information. Making the terrifying understandable, the unspeakable bearable. Facilitating conversations. Holding hope. Diversity like this has a suffocating weight and people – and children – around the world are drowning under it. They don’t need to be alone.

Empowering therapists and parents and partners and doctors to become comfortable with people like me, hearing stories of hope and meaningful lives, having a language for experiences so you can share them, and meeting others like yourself are powerful antidotes to isolation, darkness, and terror. So I’ve flown half way around the world to reconnect with a movement I believe in and add my small candle to all the lights people are holding out there in that darkness.