Discourse analyses represent a broad spectrum of methods exploring the performative side of conversations and thus form an important knowledge base for psychotherapy, especially interesting for postmodern approaches that emphasize the use of language and conversation as co-creation of meanings. The workshop will briefly introduce some simple concepts and models from discourse analysis, focusing mainly on the micro-level of discourse, in particular the formulation, calibration and function of questions.

Participants will have the opportunity to conduct short interviews in small groups, record them and examine selected short sections in detail using the above models from discourse analyses. They will thus have the opportunity to reflect in more detail on the performative side of dialogue. Space will also be devoted to the integration of the acquired knowledge into their own practice.

Facilitators: Edita Henzl, Stanislav Matoušek

In a form of facilitated dialogue we will introduce the practice of Open Dialogue in the organization Zahrada 2000, which has operated in the region of Jesenicko, a hilly part of the Czech Republic, since 1998.

Open dialogue was implemented in the whole organization. However, the flagship and the place where OD network meetings mainly take place, is the multidisciplinary outreach team. Zahrada 2000 does not provide only help in crisis, but also a comprehensive complex of services, including psychosocial rehabilitation, employment and housing support, which stands on values of transparency, openness and co-responsibility. Significantly, in the whole organization people with lived psychiatric experience are included, some of whom are facilitators of Open Dialogue, or take part in the outreach work. Zahrada 2000 together with the Narativ Association organizes education programs in OD, among others there is a five year psychotherapeutic training in Open Dialogue.

The goal of the workshop is to create a space for dialogue and discussion, for example for the following questions: What are the key moments in implementation OD into practice? What has been most difficult about the implementation of OD in the Czech republic? We can also talk about the importance of preparedness of an organization for implementing OD or about resources and limits in the country’s mental health care system. If needed, we can work on these topics in smaller groups.

Open Dialogue has been developing vividly in the Czech Republic in recent years, many network meetings have been held, many people have received training in Open Dialogue, and people with their own experience of mental health issues are also involved in facilitating network meetings and training. 

We would like to create a space to share our own experiences of OD. During the workshop, we will explore our experiences coming from different positions, both from the position of someone who has experienced a network meeting in their personal life, and from the position of a professional, training participant or worker who is a member of an organisation offering open dialogue. Therefore, we would like to invite especially people who already have experience with Open Dialogue. We will share together what Open Dialogue has brought us and what are its effective factors from the perspective of these experiences. We will focus especially on personal, human experience. 

Since dialogue is a creative and shared experience and a co-created process, the final form of the workshop will depend on who participates and where the dialogue takes us. It will be a facilitated dialogue in circles and small groups involving reflective processes.

Collaborative-dialogical approaches promote an egalitarian relationship between all those involved in a network meeting. This has created some debate over the role of the therapist and their authority and position of power. To consider how power is enacted in dialogical meetings, we reviewed discursive research into dialogical meetings with a view to understanding how power is presented and negotiated in actual therapeutic interactions. In the presentation part of this workshop, I will first describe ways that power has been theorised and how they may relate to dialogical practices. I will then present the findings of our review focusing on the deontic/interactional dimension about how therapists direct and manage the structure of a session, and the epistemic/semantic dimension concerning claims of knowledge and truth. We will also discuss the organisational and social pressures on therapists to enact power in various forms and the idea that the exercise of power, in appropriate ways, may actually facilitate the development of dialogue. 

In the interactive section of the workshop there will be time allocated for small and large group discussions. I will nominate some open questions that participants can focus their discussion around such as: How do the presented findings fit with your ideas about power? How do you see the role of power in dialogical practices? How do you negotiate power relationships in your own work?

The purpose of the workshop is to introduce a dialogical way of working with substance use and addiction issues. A brief comparison between Motivational Interviewing (MI) and Open Dialogue (OD) will be offered whereas MI is widely known as an effective evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder, and OD is an approach that has been spread in recent years after having promising outcomes in working with first psychotic episodes. Similarities and differences between MI and OD will be highlighted to show the potential of OD in working with families and networks who struggle with substance use and addiction issues.

An interactive activity - experiential exercise in small groups - will be offered to show how we can make "habit" part of our network dialogue.

Mental health settings, especially those centered on inpatient and acute care, are often informed by what might be referred to as a biomedical paradigm. Clinicians often invoke risk aversive practices. The consumer describes their care preferences times when they are experiencing significant difficulties. This Workshop presents a description of the development of Advance Statements for mental health consumers at Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District using a co-design process and an update of the implementation of Advance Statements in practice. 

Part A: A brief description of the history of advance statements, the co-design process and the final document produced. A brief description of the Mental Health Service's current stage of implementation. In small groups, participants review the document and reflect on their initial reactions to it.

Part B: A role play or detailed description of developing an advance statements with participants representing different points of view that may be present or not present as the advance statement is being prepared (eg consumer, carers, clinician developing advance statements, clinicians who may need to refer to the advance statement in the future, legislators).

Part C: Participants reflect on the idea that Advance Statements may or may not represent an effort to bring dialogical principles to mainstream mental health settings.

Peer support workers and journalists from Studio 27 Michal Kašpar and Tomáš Vaněk will share their view on the pros and cons of peer support work. They experienced personally the shift from the psychiatric worldview to the recovery-oriented approach as a mainstream in the Czech mental health care system. Thus they have a lot to say about the recovery concept itself and the role it has played in their lives. Some issues to be discussed are: the personal story as a work tool; where are the borders of “peer” work and engagement; the solidarity, belonging and mutual understanding of people with mental health problems going over the notions of “self-help” or “peer work”. Non-hierarchical approach to life; finding common ground with both mental health professionals and so called “patients”.

Michal and Tomáš belong into the first group of peer workers in the Czech Republic, both starting this “career” at least 10 years ago as peer lecturers in the project by the Centre for Mental Health Care Development. At that time they already had a lot of experience with informal support among people with mental health issues. Michal led a self-help LSD Theatre Company and together with Tomáš they also wrote a book bringing 13 life stories of people with mental health experience. In 2015, together with Břetislav Košťál they launched the media project called Studio 27. Now they work as journalists and lecturers in the mental health area.

In the first part of the workshop Michal and Tomáš will be in dialogue with Martin Novák from the Narativ Association. All participants will then be invited to share their views, thoughts and experience.

In this workshop we would like to share how to use a technique of sandtray during a first session with a family in crisis with (small) children in a dialogical way. We find the technique especially useful with traumatized children, chidden with psychosomatic illness, children in high violence families or children whose voice is not being heard for some reason. In the presentation part we would like to explain how to use the technique dialogically and involve the whole system present.

The technique will be practiced in small groups of 4-5 people with actual sandtray (we can bring 4-5 sandtrays). Reflection of the experience. Discussion.

Bakhtin writes that to become free subjects, we need to liberate ourselves not only from causal necessity but also from aesthetic necessity. In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (Bakhtin, 1990) he elaborates on the idea that for humans to become subjects, the ability and possibility to step out of the dialogue through a “loophole” (p. 40) is essential. We must resist collapsing into the rhythm of the dialogue. “By rhythm, I can only be possessed (…) in rhythm I am not aware of myself. (…) In this sense, ethical freedom is not only freedom from causal necessity but also freedom from aesthetic necessity.” (p. 194).

In this workshop, we take ideas like these as a point of departure. From this starting point, we explore what happens if we place the possibility of stepping in and out of dialogues as a fundamental condition for our human living and existence. What it means to exist through dialogues cannot be reduced to our constant presence in the responsivity that dialogue offers. To exist literally means to step out, out-stepping (ex-sistere). This suggests that existing as a subject is about a kind of dialogical loop where we from inside the dialogue, step out, break with the formative dialogues - but only as a move to make a comeback to the dialogue and “introduce” something new that may interrupt the coherent flow of events.

In our workshop, we invite participants to ponder what a concern for stepping in and stepping out, being extra-rhythmic, and attention to loopholes in dialogue may bring about. We relate this to three different settings explored in three different research projects. First, a study exploring the interplay between inner and outer dialogues in network meetings. Second, a study exploring how the landscapes of the communities may be helpful. Third is an exploration of a 17-second sequence from an encounter between a girl and a mental health practitioner. In the workshop, we will offer short presentations on the topic, and some reflections. The workshop will invite responses through the method of “the Fishbowl”, where the participants can step into a separated small group of chairs, to offer their comments or reflections, before they step out of “the Fishbowl” again. We will conclude with a short plenary session for final remarks.

We think of Dialogue as the complementation and the productivity of opposites, which maintain their dynamic movement as content of the language, whether internal or external.

We adhere to the idea that relationships with the other should be thought of lovingly and, at the same time, we propose the inclusion of difference. In order to discuss A book about dialogue by Martín Glozman and its translation into English, there will be a dialogue with Jaakko Seikkula and the workshop participants.  

We are going to present some central ideas of the book in polyphony with Jaakko and open them up to the active polyphony of those attending the dialogue about the book.

“To heal and regain self is to be heard, to be seen and to have the capacity for dialogue. For me to be open to dialogue I must have the language and feelings to share my story.  To be present in dialogue my emotions must be connected to past experiences, and how others respond to my narrative. For dialogue to happen I must know myself and see myself through my worldview with others.” A.M.

We want to present our space of Dialogue Antonio Muñoz from Manhattan and Martín Glozman from Buenos Aires, to continue our dialogues started and deepened in virtuality, for the first time in person at this Conference in Olomouc. We both have lived experiences, training in Intentional Peer Support and experience in Dialogic Practices. We want to share some challenges and questions, to learn together and in community. We invite you to dialogue and enhance our voices together.

“For me, meeting Antonio along with other Peers from the US during the last year opened up the perspective and the possibility of connecting with my past and its painful experiences, but also the joy that connecting with another implies. Likewise, it taught me to connect with other friends and colleagues and with myself in another way. I would say that this dialogue deepened my own humanity, and helped me to heal. At the same time, the question arose for me of the extent to which it is possible to dialogue and open up emotions in everyday life, as was the case with the Peers, and to what extent we must respect the process of everyday life and our loved ones. I share the question about how doors open little by little and it is possible to find a balance between these lines that appear along the way.” M.G.

We will facilitate a space open to dialogue, in order to share experiences and learnings. Connected to the past and open to the present and future, seeking community, growing, thinking and living together. Through sharing voices and being connected we hope to create a shared experience of listening and responding in which new understanding is generated. We may touch the following topics: the need (or not) of diagnoses, relationship to medicines, value and possibility of connecting dialogue and traditional medicine.

Because we have a reasonable suspicion that spirituality can help recovery from mental illness, we bring this topic to the discussions in the Iceberg Clubhouse (www.ledovec.cz). In 2018-20 there was an open group with the same name as the workshop. Although it brought together a significantly spiritually and religiously diverse community, the meaningfulness and joy of the gathering held the group together. The phrase, "if I told my psychiatrist this..." was often heard. We managed to share our own deep spiritual experiences without imposing them on others. Simple rules and a commitment to dialogue helped. We would like to mediate and offer this experience in our workshop.

After a brief introduction to the context, we would like to offer a gathering such as we did in our group at Glacier. After introducing the simple rules, we will share our experiences how spirituality has helped us to recover (in a broad sense, i.e., recovery not only from mental illness, but from any suffering or difficult situation).

Two facilitators will be facilitating the meeting, and if there are a large number of participants we will split into two groups. Participants of all kinds are welcome (even those who would rather avoid using the term "spirituality" to describe their own experience).

The World Tree Yggdrasil - the axis of the world (the image of the mighty mythical tree comes from Nordic mythology - thus it has the same place of origin as the open dialogue). This tree, which connects the opposites, or the lower and upper planes through the central trunk, we will become step by step during the exercise. Yggdrasil symbolizes the dialogic space of our body. In the exercise itself, we will touch on several principles of Open Dialogue, which we will gradually visualize as accurately as possible. We dive inside the body, connecting with the breath:

1/ Feet-roots-grounding refers to the dialogic network, the web of our contacts - family, loved ones, co-workers, and connections to the earth at large - from which we emerge, grow, and draw strength and new impulses from unconscious levels.

2/ The trunk - the center of the body - the solar plexus brings us into the space of the Here and Now, to which we also return again and again in dialogical encounters. Working with "nano-sensations" - subtle signals of the body and consciously grasping them. In the moment of concentration, these symptoms themselves demand our attention. They point to the natural beginning of creation and imagination. Subtle sensations, sometimes varied or even contradictory, point to the conversation of our body, we learn to recognize them, to remain in stillness and, if necessary, in uncertainty, without necessarily arriving at results or solutions.

3/ From the center of the body we ascend to the upper half of the body - the Tree Crown, the hand-branches. The flowering of personal space, the kinesphere - reflects our own attitude. It is an emphasis on the one who stands in the center. At the top of the head we visualize an opening through which energy - the sap of the tree - flows freely from the roots to the crown and back again. We become a living, integrated system. Solid, grounded, and at the same time gently discerning to the fingertips-leaves. We are open to what is coming, much like a dialogue.

The Yggdrasil tree naturally "embodies" a dialogical diversity of perspectives, ultimately united in one organic and functional whole.

Teachings related to Social Justice in therapy tend to be rich in awareness of the –ISMS (racism, classism, sexism, etc) that counsellors and their clients might encounter in their work together, with emphasis placed upon participating in advocacy for systemic and social change. However, there isn’t always a connection made of this awareness of the –isms to the front-line, everyday counselling work that therapists and clients do together.

I invite participants to join me to explore this connection. Consideration of how Social Justice can be recognized in the everyday practices of counsellors – in their do-INGS, in therapy with their clients - will be the focus. We will focus on how we can see, name, and respond to the “social” aspects that might be influencing and oppressing individuals, families, communities, and practitioners.

I will touch on the theoretical underpinnings of social ontology (social and institutional organisation of experience), and I will demonstrate how I have been using conceptual mapping in therapy work, presenting a case study as an example.

Reflectivity and reflexivity are pivotal when creating and joining in collaborative professional relationships like the therapist-client or the supervisory relationship. Though reflection is a natural process, (professional) reflectivity is not, this requires practice, as does reflexivity. The difference between the two is that reflectivity is about looking at a situation from an about-ness stance, whilst reflexivity is acknowledging a withness-stance.

The goal of this workshop is to co-create an enabling atmosphere in which participants are invited to explore how they can optimally make use of incorporating inner values and dialogues that matter within the dialogue, with an open and inviting attitude to the conversational partners, lived and embodied experiences and broader contexts.

The workshop facilitates a short presentation, some preliminary outcomes of research about the (reflexive) supervisory relationship, and exercises to incite using other forms than verbal communication. However, the pith of the workshop lays in the co-construction, learning in togetherness, like a warm lab.

We draw on our own (embodied) experiences, knowledge and knowing, using knowing that is gained before. It might very well be that all of us leave the room with less answers than new questions, that evoke curiosity, and help us in a further exploration when in coming professional dialogues.

Symptoms, like words, have multiple meanings. It is, therefore, a communication full of subtleties related to precise socio-historical and cultural contexts. Just as a word to be understood needs the context of the sentence, a symptom to be understood needs to be connected to the context in which we live. Therefore, before decoding it, we need to contextualize it, making a series of interrogations and suggesting clues for dialogical reflection, always in a more interrogative than affirmative posture.

Workshop will be given in Portugese with English translation

Community Integrative Therapy is a systemic and integrative dialogical practice in community mental health and social work. It offers a space for “listening, speaking and building links”, functioning according to precise rules, that protect from any projection and desire for influence. Starting from a “situation-problem”, a lot of solutions will emerge from the sharing of life experiences, in a climate of tolerance and freedom. It allows its participants to take care of themselves and others through a relationship without enslavement. It promotes collective resilience: linking / unbinding / linking, the basis of emotional life. It develops the sense of community, the pleasure of sharing solidarity. Together to overcome the obstacles of life, to grow together.

Workshop will be given in Portugese with English translation

In this workshop we will explore possible ways to work productively with different types of experience within psychiatric practice at an equal and respectful level. To create a recovery supportive mental health care it is vital to have a multi-perspective team working together. Half plus one of its members should be users of psychiatric services somewhere on their road of recovery and experiential experts in psychiatry and recovery. Other members are practitioners from several disciplines, but also board members, managers, policy makers and politicians. Most of the work in this team consists of building mutual trust and respect. But how to get there when half plus one of its members are struggling with personal pain, damage and anger, because they are victims of the (side-) effects of psychiatry? How to get there when the other half minus one of its members represent a repressive and damaging system, in fact they become the oppressors themselves? Several ways of growing into a trust based multi-perspective team that really can co-create recovery support and can change the psychiatric system are discussed.

The format depends on persons that want to follow the workshop. If there is a multi-perspective audience there will be subgroups representing different points of view on the psychiatric innovation challenges related to dealing with and witnessing pain. If the audience consists mostly of mental health practitioners the assignment will focus on exchanging experiences with ‘angry advocates’ and how to make these meetings fruitful for all parties. In the end participants will have a chance to formulate a concrete goal within their work in the next coming weeks to overcome a painful gap between their own perspective and role within psychiatry and the role and perspective of another member of a potential multiperspective team.

Wilma Boevink’s column Angry Patients

Angry patients

You see them at conferences: angry psychiatric patients. They huddle together over coffee. You see them looking around and whispering. Typical behaviour of minorities. And of course, they are the first to the microphone when there is an opportunity for questions. Or they shout their comments through the room, at random, while the speaker is busy with his presentation. Angry psychiatric patients at conferences. They definitely disrupt the procedures. Someone who takes the microphone and tells a story full of intimate outpourings, unconnected to the conference theme, wrongly timed and filled with rage, rage, rage.

In the room you see people shifting uncomfortably or thinking 'oh no, there they are again'. Or they just have a chat with each other – because you must sit it out anyway. Especially if the chairperson of the day does not dare to say: madam, stick to the subject or: madam, what exactly is your question to this speaker? The kind of chairperson who thinks: patients are sacred, you should not interrupt them.

Then the anger erupts, getting bigger as the chairperson gives you more – ‘nonserious’ – space. Your words rush the adrenaline through your blood. You get increasingly angry behind your microphone. You forget the reason, the point you wanted to make, the question you had formulated. You get angry, angrier, furious. You pull out all the stops. You do feel it alright, the irritation in the room. You know full well that you're being tolerated. Your fellow conference attendees think you're a nuisance. They don't hear what you have to say. Your message is a hard one to hear because it gets lost in all the anger. The raising of your voice turns into screaming. You forget that you need to turn your anger into a calm, clear, and sharp argument. You forget that conferences are one big game with rules, and that those who handle the rules best win that game.

You forget your professionalism. You can't hold back the anger, not after all that talk about patients, without you yourself being provided a formal space to speak. After all that talk about ‘we all want the same thing anyway, happiness for humanity and hallelujah for the psychiatric patient'. Then everyone gets the full load: a random speaker, the chairperson of the day, the audience. But in the end, of course, you draw the short straw. For they have all seen what they are used to seeing. A person without reason. A psychiatric patient.

Illustrated by the celebration of a yearly Norwegian national birthday, the 17th of May, it will be shown how this celebration and its concrete rituals grew out of an engagement for 1) a people’s collective ownership of a nation, 2) all inhabitants’ collective and ethical responsibility for defining its ongoing and future development, and 3) the newness made possible by including ordinary and minority voices into the making of its future as a sustainable togetherness.

We will look into the inception of this ritual, its history of divergent and opposing stakeholders and voices, its later institutionalization, its contemporary realization with its multi-voiced and polyphonic ownerships, its many languages and expressions, its joy, its meeting points at boundaries, its remaking of self-perception and identity, and its expressions of resistance. Most of all it will be illustrated how children’s participation is establishing premises, as well as how contemporary challenges of inviting less-known voices of ethnic minorities and new-Norwegians coming as refugees, do influence the dialogues of a togetherness conceived of as a possible future of a sustainable nation.

The presentation will include the use of historical and contemporary materials. After a presentation, dialogical space and reflecting processes in small groups will be arranged. Thereafter, the sharing of all reflections will be invited.

First of all, the need to use literature to vivify dialogue depends on the progressive and seemingly unstoppable withering of our emotional and verbal lexicon: we see a focus and impoverishment that induce to prefer the conquest of a goal leaving out the context, the past and the future (the one shot) and the quickening and the anxiety of not wasting one's time that lead to give prominence only to the nodal point of a situation or a show: once the fans watched the all game; now, they want to see only the goals (the highlight). In dialogue, however, we participate with all our being in the contingency of the context, and need to extend our listening to the wholeness of different presences in our inner and outer dialogue and this can be well taught by literature. At the cinema (as while reading a novel) it happens to experience emotions and upheavals that, also thanks to mirror neurons, capture our bodies and, making them live other lives, are able to get us out of the cinema different from when we had entered, after that dive in a world of projections, identifications, mirroring.

Why?

Because today parents are too busy and worry about the material necessity of their children but not about their interpersonal needs; teachers are too pressured by bureaucratic burdens, by the fear of being challenged, by the excessively high amount of students to look after and more focused on the education of competitive and performative individuals at the expense of our relational mind; not to mention social and health workers who, pressed by performance and the culture of diagnosis, must always be up to the expectations of being experts, and often fail to be attuned to requests for help. The psychologists and researchers are on the other hand increasingly torn apart from the real life and need to awaken the experience of the world of which science expresses second degree knowledge, since like a map, scientific studies are abstractions based on direct experience of the world to which one must return in order to be able to describe and feel it.

In these conditions, if instincts are innate and emotions only partial, who will model the ability to develop feelings and the existence of multiple points of view, and attitudes, different from one's own, if not a series of stories? Literature, for its part, uses “idea concepts”, i.e. decodable statements which obey to a rational chaining also when they describe states of mind, while cinema uses “image concepts” which, at the expense of reflexivity and breaks induced by a story told, drag into a vortex of sequences that affect other areas of our psyche and are as much important, although in a different way, to fuel dialogue.

Format of the interactive part

In the workshop we aim to explore in a reflective process of dialogues, how cinema and literature vivify the dialogical space as they engage us emotionally, activating our embodied memories, surprise us in our inner dialogue since we stay in both positions: as listeners and speakers in just following the unknown without controlling it. We move from the worlds of things and facts to worlds of sense and meaning. This emotional awakening underlies a joint experience so fruitful for dialogue. The result is twofold: on the one hand we discover something of ourselves we did not know, on the other hand the unconscious and embodied memories that cinema makes us live are not ephemeral but are durably incorporated within us and can serve to activate authentic and fruitful dialogues.

The purpose of the workshop is also to introduce the participants to the timeout model, a low-threshold dialogic approach. It consists of a group of six/eight people who, given a specific theme, for us, Cinema and literature, vivify dialogue. The participants let emerge insights in themselves and in the other ones. We will share this question in a dialogic and reflective process which will progressively enrich and deepen our understanding of the theme, the others, ourselves.

Timeout, during the recent years, has spread widely in Finnish society as well as in Europe, latest in Italy, and is able to attract people from various contexts (services, schools, companies, associations and ordinary citizens) to enrich their knowledge of the others, of themselves and of the most diverse themes. The model, thanks to its tools allows each to experiment in multiple roles in facilitating dialogue. Each one becomes a protagonist in facilitating dialogue. Timeout includes the heritage of open dialogue (Jaakko Seikkula and Tom Arnkil) and has been studied for several years by researchers of the Finnish innovation found with the aim to make the dialogical principles easy to experience for each of us in our everyday life, as well as further a democratic culture enhancing our social responsibility in being active and proactive members of our community. As Tom Arnkil has written: it’s never too early to have a dialogue.

https://www.timeoutdialogue.fi/finnish-dialogue-is-spreading-around-the-world/

https://www.pensamultimedia.it/libro/9788867609055