2 December 2025

This past November Dr David Raune, Clinical Psychologist in the Harrow & Hillingdon Early Intervention in Psychosis Team, led a team of collaborative University College London postgraduate students to present two talks and a poster at the 59th Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies Association Annual (ABCT) conference in New Orleans.

The Psychosis Phenomenology Programme (PPP) project talks (N = 740) were about early intervention CBT for auditory hallucinations, based on local phenomenology surveys of our extremely culturally diverse patients.

Gabrielle Ng (UCL) presented on ‘positive voices', Charmayne Lau Tze Wing (UCL) presented on ‘command voices’ (on behalf of Ching So, UCL), and Athina Servi presented a poster on an update review of command voice phenomenology (Diana Mirea, UCL).

The findings indicate the need to screen for and intervene with dangerous command voices from the first episode, while also recognising—from a culturally humble perspective—that about a quarter of our culturally diverse local patients report important benefits from their voices.

The results have been used to train several CNWL teams, with the aim of enabling more personalised, culturally humble, and safer clinical care by multidisciplinary teams. The findings have also been submitted by UCL to an international journal.

Dr Raune would like to thank his funders Professor Ryan Kemp, Director of Therapies, and Lynis Lewis, Director of NOCLOR. Also Honorary Senior Programme Co-ordinator Jonathan Souray, and, for Managerial/Directoral support, Krishan Sahota, Sue Barrett, Alastair Penman, Mellisha Padayatchi, Kingsley Akuffo and Ali Modaresi.