This podcast was recorded on Thursday 12 March 2015 as part of the Hearing the Voice Lecture Series. It features a presentation by Dr David Smailes (Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, Durham University) on ‘Tailoring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to Sub-types of Voice-hearing’.

Abstract: Several meta-analyses have suggested that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for psychosis has small to moderate effects on positive symptoms (e.g., auditory hallucinations and delusions). However, a recent meta-analysis reported that these effect sizes are substantially inflated because of methodological problems in many trials of CBT for psychosis.

In this talk, Dr Smailes focuses on CBT for voice-hearing and suggests that one reason for its limited effectiveness is that current interventions tend to treat voice-hearing as a relatively homogenous experience, despite evidence that voice-hearing is highly heterogeneous. These heterogeneous experiences do, however, appear to cluster into a set of subtypes, and it is possible that CBT for voice-hearing may be more effective if it is tailored to the subtype that a voice-hearer reports.

Dr Smailes describes a novel CBT for voice-hearing manual that Hearing the Voice has developed in collaboration with a local clinical psychologist, which encourages clinicians to tailor CBT to subtypes of voice-hearing, and discusses the promise and limitations of this kind of approach.