About Open Dialogue UK
Open Dialogue UK was formed in 2012 in order to support the development of the Open Dialogue approach in the NHS in the UK.
Nick Putman, a psychotherapist based in the UK, who later founded Open Dialogue UK, had a long standing interest in working with people diagnosed with ‘psychosis’, experiencing extreme states, or hearing voices. Having worked and lived in various therapeutic communities and trained as a psychotherapist with the Philadephia Association in London, who have a long history of working therapeutically with people having such experiences, he became interested in the possibility of developing a more therapeutic, psychosocial, and family-based approach to ‘psychosis’ within the NHS. Typically people diagnosed with ‘psychosis’ were primarily being treated with medication and often hospitalisation, with any family work largely focused on psycho-education. However, research conducted by John Read and others has highlighted the prevalance of trauma in the histories of people who have ‘psychotic’ experiences later in life, and therefore the need for more psychotherapeutic work.
Nick travelled internationally to work in and learn from a variety of community based therapeutic approaches to people experiencing ‘psychosis’, and was inspired by much of what he found, but it was not until he arrived at the Western Lapland mental health service in 2012, where Open Dialogue was developed, that he became convinced that he had found a service model that could be taken up by the NHS and other public mental health services. And so Open Dialogue UK was formed with this specific purpose.
Our current work
Our current focus is on running Open Dialogue training programmes for individuals and teams working in the NHS and international public mental health services, as well as teams from related mental health and social services and independent practitioners. We have always worked with a wide variety of professionals, including psychologists, peer workers, psychiatrists, social workers, care coordinators and support workers. We are currently running a (20 day) foundation training programme online and a trainers training programme in London, which takes place over two years (40 days). A new online foundation training programme is planned for 2027, starting in February and applications are now open. For further information and to apply to the programme, please see this page.
As well as running our foundation training programme online anually, we are also able to travel as a trainer team to run the programme in-house in services in the UK and internationally. Typically this programme is run over 8-12 months in blocks of varying length (2-5 days). If you are interested in us running a training in your service/region, please see this page.
In addition to this we will shortly be resuming our one and two day online introductions to the Open Dialogue approach. You can find information on the next seminars we have planned to the right of this page, and here.
We also offer one day and half-day supervision sessions to teams, which can either be organised online or in-person/in-house. For further information, please see this page.
For information about the work we have done previously, please see the section below.
The development of Open Dialogue UK
For the first few years our work was focused on raising awareness of the Open Dialogue approach across the UK. Following seminars in Brighton, London and Nottingham in 2012 and 2013, we organised a series of two day seminars in Hackney, London, in 2014, which were led by Jaakko Seikkula, one of the founders of the Open Dialogue approach, Nick Putman, and key members of the staff team from the mental health service in Western Lapland where Open Dialogue was developed – Markku Sutela, Kari Valtanen and Mia Kurtti. Around 300 participants attended at least one seminar, and more than 25 NHS trusts were represented. Inspired by this experience Mia Kurtti and Nick Putman travelled across the UK in 2015 to run seminars in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Mancester and Edinburgh.
Given our aim of developing the Open Dialogue approach in the NHS, it was clear that we needed to establish training programmes for staff. Work on this aim began in 2013, and by 2015 we had established the first full three year Open Dialogue training progamme to be run outside of Finland. This programme was run for a second time in 2018.
Given that this thee year training is considered to be the ‘core’ training for practitioners in Western Lapland, where the approach developed, it felt important to start with this training first. However, it became clear that we also needed to develop a foundation training programme, in order to help the approach to develop more widely. Whilst not a replacement for the core three year training, it would at least help practitioners to be able to start to practice, where ongoing supervision could be put in place, alongside the possibility of further training.
Since 2016 we have run our 20 day foundation training programme more than 30 times, in 5 different countries. We discovered that we could run the programme with intrepreters, and, during the pandemic, that it could also be run online. We are currently planning to run the training online in 2027 and further details can be found here. Sometimes, following a foundation training we were able to establish ongoing supervision for teams. More information about our supervision work can be found here.
It felt important to continue to offer introductory seminars to the approach (one and two days) and we have now organsied more than 60 such seminars. Currently we are running these seminars both online and in-house across the UK. Further details of our seminars can be found to the right of this page and here.
In 2016 we organised a conference in Lonon to bring together speakers from around the world who were developing the Open Dialogue approach. Around 600 people attended the event at Friends Meeting House in London.
Up until the pandemic we were able to organise Open Dialogue network meetings for families who were looking for support outside of the NHS.