What Do We Do?
Project Inspire is a club and resource open to anyone in the greater LA community. We aim to provide education, community, and support for those who experience psychosis and or voices, visions, and “unusual” beliefs.
Spring 2025 Guest Speakers
Haines Hall 352
Tuesdays 6-8PM
Zoom Link for All Meetings : https://ucla.zoom.us/j/84029023505
Week 3: April 15th
Tanya Luhrmann
Voices
They are strange experiences—a voice whispered in the wind, a god who speaks from on high—but far more common than we think. At the beginning of most great religions lies a voice. Who hears such voices? I have spoken to hundreds of people, in many countries, who have heard voices, some only once, some more often. Most of these people are not psychiatrically ill. Some are. In this talk I will discuss what we know about the difference between mad voices and sane voices, and the evidence that the way we think about voices changes our experience of them—and may soften the impact of psychosis. Most fundamentally, I will argue that voices teach us something about consciousness: about how we humans feel our thoughts, about our contradictory intuitions about our own thoughts, and how these contradictions—and the way they are elaborated or ignored by local culture—lie at the heart of the voice experience.
Week 5: April 29th
Philippe Bourgois & Laurie Kain Hart
“Deinstitutionalization" in Two Countries: Peer Support Program for and by Inmates with Psychosis Spectrum Conditions in the LA County Jail and the Trajectory of an Asylum Scandal in Greece
In this talk, we will discuss the failures and metamorphoses of deinstitutionalization in caring for people with serious mental illness in the US and Greece. We will discuss the impact of infrastructure, neoliberal hostility to non normativity, vulnerability and dependence in an era of rising homelessness, the struggles of families (and especially mothers) and the relation between authoritarian political ideology and abandonment.
Week 7: May 13th
Ippolytos Kalofonos & Sahastri Hercules
Veteran Voices & Visions: Adapting the Hearing Voices Approach to the West Los Angeles VA
The Veteran Voices and Visions (VVV) project is an adaptation of the Hearing Voices approach to the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System that serves 1.4 million Veterans. The VVV project uses virtual support groups, co-facilitated by a clinician and a Veteran peer who is an “expert-by-experience,” to normalize experiences such as hearing voices and seeing visions. We are trying to build an evidence-base to get this approach recognized and available for use across the VA. Thus, VVV includes a research component to 1) study the adaptation of a Hearing Voices Facilitator training to the VA and 2) to understand how participating in VVV groups may help Veterans live with their voices and make meaning from their experiences. Our approach has involved multidisciplinary collaborations - including perspectives and contributions from Veterans who hear voices, Veteran peer support specialists, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social researchers, and national Hearing Voices leaders. Group members explore personal understandings and contexts of so-called “unusual” experiences commonly diagnosed as psychosis rather than privileging biomedical framings; we also encourage and support Veterans in engaging with their experiences as potentially meaningful rather than only interpreting them as symptoms of an illness to be eliminated. In VVV groups, Veterans share their stories, coping strategies, and worldviews, and often end up supporting each other in their ongoing life projects. This presentation will be from a psychiatrist-anthropologist and a Veteran peer facilitator who have been collaborating together on this project.
Week 9: May 27th
Laura Adery
A Practical Guide to Knowledge and Harm Reduction with Cannabis Use and Psychosis Symptoms
Cannabis use is consistently associated with both increased presence and worsening of psychotic symptoms in healthy individuals and people with psychosis spectrum disorders. This talk will review existing scientific literature on cannabis' effects and epidemiological associations with psychotic disorders. Current evidence supports a harm reduction approach in reducing frequency of acute psychotic-like experiences, and specific recommendations will be provided.