The chair of the Paranoia Network, Pete Bullimore, is testament to how effective these methods can be. Pete heard his first voice aged seven, after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of a child minder. "I heard a child's voice telling me to keep going, that everything would be OK. It was reassuring, a bit like an imaginary friend," he says. But as the abuse went on the voices increased in number, eventually turning sinister and aggressive. "They told me to set myself on fire, to slash myself and destroy myself, often 20 or 30 voices all shouting at me at once," he says.

By his mid-twenties Pete had lost his business, his family, his home, everything. "The voices just encompassed my life; I curled up in a chair and didn't wash or eat. "I was locked in a world of voices, paranoia and depression, and it was probably the most frightening time of my life," he says. Pete spent more than a decade after that on heavy medication, but the voices never went away. He had to get out of the psychiatric system to recover. It was only when he came off the medication and met people who share his experience that he was able to stop being so afraid of the voices and actually start listening to them. He changed his relationship with his voices and worked through the meaning of his paranoia. Life isn't easy. Pete can still hears up to 40 voices at a time - it is worse when he is tired or stressed. But he has rebuilt his life and has even been hearing a more positive voice recently, which is dictated a children's book to him. It has recently been published. Titled A Village Called Pumpkin, he now runs his own training and consultancy agency delivering training on hearing voices childhood trauma and paranoia internationally. He also currently teaches at eight Universities in the UK. He also facilitates his own Maastricht centre in Sheffield in collaboration with Sheffield Health & Social Care and is currently setting up another four. He also runs the Centre’s at the Radbone unit in Derby and the Hartington unit in Chesterfield in collaboration with Derby NHS trust, he will be launching a Maastricht Approach centre in Bradford in March. "I wouldn't want to get rid of my voices now, they're part of me," he says.