Introducing LERN and the grassroots hearing voices research project
I’ve been horrifyingly busy over the past few weeks–though had a wonderful time co-leading an intensive 3-day hearing voices facilitation training in Michigan a few weeks ago–but wanted to take this opportunity to more widely announce two new initiatives I’m involved in.
First, my multi-gifted friend Laysha Ostrow (PhD candidate in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins) and I have recently launched the website for our new nonprofit: the Lived Experience Research Network (LERN). LERN’s tagline is “bridging advocacy and research by people with lived experience to advance social change” and our organizational goals include (1) promoting and facilitating research capacity building within grassroots advocacy organizations and among non-institutionally affiliated user/survivors; (2) advocating for greater attention to the inclusion of service users and survivors (as well as u/s leadership) in federally funded research and training grants; and (3) directly contributing to the focal growth of of user/survivor researcher discourse, theory and methods in the US. Here’s a list of our current projects. We’re also in the process of creating private but shareable Dropbox folders with pay-wall & copyright protected journal articles and measures; community members need only request access using the form provided and we encourage folks to suggest new themes or topics. In addition we’ve moved our group Users & Survivors in Academia (grad students)–an increasingly vibrant support and activism community– here.
