Dr Joachim Schnackenberg

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.