Open Dialogue: A life-giving approach for practitioners and participants alike
Open Dialogue is a team approach to helping someone through an extreme state or other mental health crisis. It meets people where they are, listens respectfully to every voice in the room, and makes all decisions in the presence of the whole group. It is slow to diagnose, taking time to understand the unique origins of an individual's distress and finding solutions together.
This approach began thirty years ago in Finland and has shown remarkable results, helping people get their lives back with minimal or no use of psychotropic drugs. Today, research is needed to establish its effectiveness in communities outside of Finland and demonstrate how Open Dialogue can be widely and affordably implemented.
In partnership with Open Society Foundations, Open Excellence has granted year three of a multi-year international collaborative, the HOPEnDialogue project, led by Dr. Raffaella Pocobello at ISTC-CNR in Rome, Italy.