Description
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Webinar Description:
This webinar was Session 1 of ISPS-US's series "Psychosocial Approaches to Negative Symptoms." Read full course details here: https://isps-us.org/negative-symptoms/info.html
Description Part 1 : Jens Tódor Roved - Lived Experience and Meaning This talk includes an in-person narrative about childhood sexual abuse, how it resulted in detachment from the world and made the repression of the conscious Self possible, unaware of the underlying trauma for 30+ years. It tells a story of self-hatred, self-pity, and self-fulfilling prophecies that voices had pronounced. What might be diagnosed as negative symptoms was seeking comfort in isolation, surviving isolation. The continuous need to seek refuge. Struggling with everyday life, chores, education, finding a partner, and making decisions while in constant dialogue with voices. Dealing with the aftermath. So, what happened to make the breakthrough? Choosing life means sharing the trauma. Meeting the right people at the right time and them reaching out. The ability to make life choices, find occupational balance, and engage in meaningful activities such as sport. Moreover, realizing the desire to not recover from hearing voices but instead choosing to be a whole person and live according to occupational justice. Part 2: Jeannie Bass, CPS - Lived Experience and Peer Support Traditional clinical approaches often describe reduced motivation, emotional expression, and social withdrawal as “negative symptoms” of psychosis — fixed deficits that reflect loss of functioning. But for many people with lived experience, these states are far more complex, purposeful, and intertwined with identity, meaning, and survival. In this presentation, Jeannie Bass draws from her personal story of psychosis, hospitalization, and recovery to reconsider these experiences through a broader, more human lens. This presentation will explore how cognitive slowing/quieting, retreat from relationships, flattening, and loss of initiative can emerge from spiritual crisis, identity disruption, chronic invalidation, or overwhelming internal and external worlds. Jeannie will contrast clinical explanations with psychological, spiritual, and peer-based interpretations, highlighting how these states often serve as protective or adaptive responses rather than evidence of deficit. Participants will also be introduced to peer-developed strategies that support reconnection, engagement, and meaning-making, including relational safety, choice, creative expression, and narrative reconstruction.
Presenter Bios:
Jens Roved
First and foremost, I am a voice hearer and psychosis survivor. I am a photographer, an occupational therapist, and father of two girls. I am educated at Lund University, Sweden and live in Copenhagen, Denmark. I worked previously as an occupational therapist at a palliative care unit in Malmö, Sweden and these days I teach occupational safety and preventive health care for work space at production schools.
Jeannie Bass, CPS
Jeannie Bass, CPS, is a voice hearer and someone who lives with other extreme states. She is the Director of Peer Support Services at a public-sector psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts and an advocate and a leader in the Hearing Voices Movement. With over a decade of experience in peer support within clinical and public-sector psychiatric settings, she brings a meaning-centered, connection-focused, human-experience approach to psychosis. Jeannie is a Hearing Voices Network trainer and provides training and speaking for clinicians, attorneys, students, and people with lived experience. Her personal story and advocacy have been featured on NBC, and she serves on the HVN-USA Board of Directors. She is the co-author of the online Active Learning course Reframing Psychosis Spectrum Experiences, currently available, and the accompanying workbook, forthcoming from Cognella in early 2026. Jeannie’s work is grounded in social justice and the belief that voices, visions, and alternative ways of experiencing reality deserve dignity, curiosity, and relational safety within traditional mental health care and in our broader society.
