Joachim Schnackenberg Editor

Isla Parker is a pen name. Isla is a freelance editor and writer who promotes the understanding of health issues and wellbeing. She undertook a degree in English and found it interesting to study how literature explores illness. This led to Isla writing a novel about anorexia for teenagers called Size Zero?, which is loosely based on her own experience. Isla has also co-edited The Practical Handbook of Dementia and The Practical Handbook of Eating Difficulties (both forthcoming). In her free time Isla enjoys playing the piano. She also takes part in an online writing group that has introduced her to writers from different countries. – Dr Joachim Schnackenberg is a UK-trained mental health nurse and Germany-trained social worker with experience of applying the Maastricht Hearing Voices Approach in acute and community settings. He is Director of Hearing Voices and Recovery at a Northern German mental health service provider (Diakonie Kropp). He has been part of the Hearing Voices Movement since 2000, as he was originally trained and mentored in the application of the Maastricht Approach by Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor, among others, with additional training by Marius Romme, Sandra Escher and Dirk Corstens, as well as ongoing training by every voice hearer and voice he works with or meets. In 2007 he started formally offering training in the Maastricht Approach in a variety of countries, together with his colleague Senait Debesay, a Germany-trained learning disabilities nurse and therapeutic educator, and a variety of trainer experts by experience. For his PhD, he completed the first mixed-methods effectiveness pilot trial of the Maastricht Approach and he has remained active as a trainer, supervisor, peer-reviewer and consultant in various research projects. In 2017 he lead-authored (in German) the first book to describe using the Maastricht Approach in practice. He is based in the UK and Germany. – Mark Hopfenbeck is social anthropologist specialising in health and social policy, an assistant professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), visiting fellow at London South Bank University (LSBU) and individual partner at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. At NTNU, he teaches mindfulness, is a member of the Relational Welfare research group and is involved in the development of a reflective group approach to support inmates’ wellbeing and reduce isolation within prisons. For the past 15 years, he has been teaching and supporting the implementation of the Open Dialogue approach. He is currently co-investigator on a large-scale programme of research into crisis and continuing mental health care within the NHS (the ODDESSI study) and is on the advisory board of an international collaborative study to evaluate the effectiveness of Open Dialogue in various contexts around the world (the HOPEnDialogue project).