KickOff Workshop 2019

(Click on the names below to access the full video talk given during the Meeting. Here you can find the complete list of all videos)

HOPEnDialogue has been launched with a Kickoff Workshop held on 2nd July 2019 at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council (ISTC-CNR) in Rome, Italy. Forty representatives from twelve countries attended the workshop to discuss the goals and strategy of the project.

In the opening session, Raffaella Pocobello welcomed the participants at ISTC-CNR, and psychiatrist Marcello Macario gave the welcome speech by the Italian Open Dialogue Network and by the Italian Hearing Voices Network.

The next session introduced the research context of HOPEnDialogue. The founder of Open Dialogue, Jaakko Seikkula, reviewed its principles, the evidence collected by the Finnish studies, and the challenges for the HOPEnDialogue research. Russel Razzaque and Steven Pilling, leaders of the UK ODDESSI project on which the HOPEnDialogue project plans to build, presented the ODDESSI protocol and its first results.

Gina Nikkel, President and CEO of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care, and Christopher Gordon, representative of the Foundation Board, introduced the last morning session with a talk on the Foundation, whose grant allowed HOPEnDialogue to start.

HOPEnDialogue leaders Raffaella Pocobello and Giuseppe Salamina illustrated its objectives and work plan. Research and organizational change expert Doug Ziedonis discussed how the ODDESSI’s protocol could be adapted to HOPEnDialogue, while trainers Mary Olson and Nick Putman talked about Open Dialogue training outside Finland, in the US and the UK respectively.
In the afternoon, the participants discussed some challenging points. Doug Ziedonis examined the fidelity issues and Steve Pilling discussed methodological challenges for the HOPEnDialogue study. Swiss Open Dialogue peer support specialist with lived experience, Andrea Zwicknagl, shared the perspective of someone with lived experience of the approach. As she could not be there in person, she sent a written speech that was read by Giuseppe Salamina.

To delve further into the challenging issues of fidelity, methods, and peer support, participants then split into three working groups. Results from these groups were presented and followed by some reflections from participants in plenary. The seminar closed with a remarkable speech by senior ISTC associated researcher Cristiano Castelfranchi, who outlined the relevance of the project in “awakening a revolution in individuals to change their destiny and in the mental health system”, and alerted participants to the risk of focusing primarily on existing methodology: “perhaps we should invent other ways to see research. It is fundamental in learning to disobey”.