Claire Bien

Claire Bien, MEd, is a research associate at the Yale Program for Recovery & Community Health, mental health advocate and educator, and author of a memoir: Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head. She is the immediate past president of ISPS-US and serves on the board of directors of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN)-USA www.hearingvoicesusa.org. Claire has lived experience with psychosis and holds trauma-based understandings of the vulnerabilities that led to her three extended departures from consensus reality, and spiritual, familial, and social understandings of the forces that helped guide her through her extreme states, allowing her to find/re-find herself and her life without the need for ongoing medication management. She seeks to help de-pathologize the voice-hearing experience and increase understanding that it is the social conditions of our lives, and the unresolved feelings we have when relationships go awry, that most profoundly affect people’s ability to live fully, and with dignity, in the world. Claire is particularly interested in intergenerational/epigenetic trauma, and shared perspectives between the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) and ISPS, and reflecting on the ways in which those perspectives have deepened her understanding of her voice-hearing and other unusual experiences, helping to reinforce the foundation of her continuing, unmedicated recovery.