Elisabeth Svanholmer

Elisabeth Svanholmer lives with experiences of hearing voices and identifies as highly sensitive. She finds herself on an ongoing journey to figure out how to be human and live a meaningful life in a world that seems increasingly fragmented and dehumanising. 

Elisabeth has her own experiences of using psychiatric services from 2003 to 2011 and has been involved with the hearing voices movement since 2005, first in Denmark and since 2013 in the UK.  She is now based in West Yorkshire, UK and works as an autodidact organiser and facilitator of training and mutual support groups with a particular focus on compassionate, psychological, relational, and embodied approaches to mental health.

Elisabeth is passionate about facilitating creative, supportive spaces for people to talk about their experiences and learn from each other. She believes it is important to find ways – both for ourselves personally and in communal spaces - to be with things that may be considered uncomfortable, strange, inconvenient, confusing and distressing. 

She currently runs a mutual support space for people who facilitates Hearing Voices Groups and she co-runs a peer supervision space for professionals who work with people who hear voices using a range of dialogical and compassionate approaches.  She is also involved in setting up a women only hearing voices group in Manchester and she is part of a group collaboratively exploring the impact of epistemic injustice in pubic health.

Elisabeth finds inspiration and solace in nature, movement and relationships.

She has a personal blog on www.livinglifegently.live and with her partner Rufus she shares various resources on www.openmindedonline.com

This is a talk she gave in 2019 at the launch of the website understandingvoices.com (can also be found here) She has co-authored chapters in The Practical Handbook of Hearing Voices and some of her story features in Living with Voices: 50 stories of recovery.