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, 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. In his experience there was not enough of such work taking place in the NHS, where the treatment for people diagnosed with ‘psychosis’ was primarily based on medication and often hospitalisation, with any family work typically focused on psycho-education.

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 Nick became convinced that the approach taken by the NHS and most public mental health services internationally needed to be developed in order to offer more therapeutic work that could include family/social network members. He travelled the world, meeting many inspiring people working in a variety of community projects, largely outside the public mental health care system, and became further convinced of the need for change.

Given that most people diagnosed with ‘psychosis’ are in need of public mental health care at the time of crisis, Nick continued to look for a model that could be taken up by the NHS, and on travelling twice to Western Lapland in 2012, spending a month in total studying the Open Dialogue model developed there and participating in network meetings, it became very clear that this was the model he had been looking for – he felt very much at home and was energised by what he found.  And so he formed Open Dialogue UK and began working hard to create opportunities to develop the approach both in the UK and internationally.

The Open Dialogue approach is both a philosophical/theoretical approach to people experiencing a mental health crisis and their families/networks, and a system of care, developed in Western Lapland in Finland over the last 40 years. In the 1980s psychiatric services in Western Lapland were in a poor state, in fact they had one of the worst incidences of the diagnosis of schizophrenia’ in Europe. Now they have the best documented outcomes in the Western World. For example, around 75% of those experiencing psychosis have returned to work or study within 2 years and only around 20% are still taking antipsychotic medication at 2 year follow-up.

Remarkably, Open Dialogue is not an alternative to standard psychiatric services, it is the psychiatric service in Western Lapland. This has afforded a unique opportunity to develop a comprehensive approach with well-integrated inpatient and outpatient services. Working with families and social networks, as much as possible in their own homes, Open Dialogue teams work to help those involved in a crisis situation to be together and to engage in dialogue. It has been their experience that if the family/team can bear the extreme emotion in a crisis situation, and tolerate the uncertainty, in time shared meaning usually emerges and healing/recovery is possible. Open Dialogue has drawn on a number of theoretical models, including systemic family therapy, dialogical theory and social constructionism.

In 2021, the ISPS published the book ‘Open Dialogue for Psychosis – Organising Mental Health Services to prioritise dialogue, relationship and meaning‘. Co-edited by Nick Putman and Brian Martindale, this was the first international book on the Open Dialogue approach. More than 100 people from 12 countries contributed to the book, which included contributions from families who had experienced the Open Dialogue approach. With additional sections on rtraining, service development and research, the book has proved to be a comprehensive and valuable introduction to the approach. For more informaiton and to order a copy please visit this website. 

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 an (20 day) foundation training programme online and a trainers training programme in London, which takes place over two years (40 days). 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). For further information, please see this page. A new online foundation training programme is planned for 2027 and applications are now open. For further information and to apply to the programme, 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.

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 online (details of which can be found to the right of this page), and in-house across the UK – details of this can be found 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.