Harlene Anderson Ph.D.
Harlene Anderson is a popular speaker, consultant, and trainer. She uses her tools—her insights, her keen interest, her engaging conversational style, and her leadership skills–to help and inspire individuals, families, and organizations to achieve clarity, focus, renewed energy, and often surprising results. Harlene is an internationally recognised innovator and a co –founder of postmodern-oriented collaborative-dialogic practice and Taos Institute and Houston Galveston Institute.
Rai Waddingham
Rai is an Open Dialogue practitioner and international mental health trainer with over 12 years of experience in adult mental health. She specialises in innovative ways of supporting people who struggle with extreme states such as ‘psychosis’, ‘dissociation’ and trauma.
Olga Runciman
Olga is a psychologist specialising in extreme states (psychosis). She is an international trainer and speaker, writer, campaigner, artist, and co-founder of the Danish Hearing Voices Network and the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal.
Jaakko Seikkula Ph.D. Professor of Psychotherapy (emeritus) University of Jyväskylä
Jaakko was involved in developing family centered mental health care since early 1980’s. Later the new approach was named as Open Dialogues and Jaakko was a member of the original team in Western Lapland in Finland. Since 1988 has conducted tenths of research projects about the effectiveness of the open dialogue approach, especially in psychotic problems. At the same time his interest has been on looking at dialogues as the basic form of human life and therapeutic practice. Lately focus has been on the embodiment in dialogue, how do we communicate in our bodies and create a relational mind.
Gail Simon PhD. Systemic Psychotherapist and Research Supervisor
Gail is co-founder of The Pink Practice, an LGBTQI counselling and psychotherapy service, and co-director of Everything is Connected Press. Her current intrests are in transmaterial worlding, researching one`s own family history, decolonising society and its therapeutic practice and using writing as a method of inquiry.
Kai Alhanen
Kai Alhanen is the director of Dialogue Academy and a researcher in political philosophy. He is one of Finland’s leading experts on dialogue and a respected trainer also in other parts of the world. Alhanen has previously published books on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and John Dewey, Dialogue in Democracy, and The Dialogue Book. Additionally, he has introduced innovative dialogue concepts like Timeout and National Dialogues, which have gained widespread recognition.
Dainius Pūras
Dainius Pūras is professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and public mental health at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is also a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Development Center of Vilnius university Hospital. Among positions he was holding, Dainius Pūras was President of Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Vilnius University, Director of the Human rights monitoring institute. During the years 2007-2011 Dainius Pūras was a member of the UN Committee on the rights of the child. During the years 2014 – 2020 he was serving as a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health.
More information about his reports to the UN and other activities in the role of the UN Special rapporteur: www.handover-dialogues.org/legacy
Flick Grey (Foundation Training)
Flick Grey trained in Open Dialogue with Open Dialogue UK in 2015-2018. She has traveled extensively, funded by a SANE Australia Fellowship, to explore the intersection(s) between peer work and Open Dialogue across 8 countries. In particular, Flick is interested in how dialogical and systemic approaches open up new ways of understanding experiences of distress, and possibilities for how humans move through complexity. She has often been told that she asks questions that invite deeper conversations, sensing into the “not yet sayable”. She also facilitates Intentional Peer Support and Warm Data Labs, and is a mama, keen gardener and devoted camper.