Hearing voices

[Laird]

There seem to be three basic categories of "voice hearers":

1. On the positive side, mediums, who experience the voices of those who have passed on, and who (generally) connect those passed spirits with their living relatives.
   
2. On the negative side, those who have been - or are liable to being - diagnosed with "psychosis", "schizophrenia", or a similar mental health condition, who generally find the voices distressing and debilitating.
   
3. In between, those who are not liable to being diagnosed with a "mental illness" but who also don't consider themselves to be mediums; these people simply live with the experience of hearing voices.
   

I intend this to be a thread where we mostly explore the latter two scenarios, but where their relationship to the former can also be explored. I intend for us to do this especially through sharing resources such as videos, podcasts, and essays, but also through discussion/debate amongst us.

To be clear, I have an ongoing experience which fits into the second category.

To kick things off, here are a couple of resources:

1. Psychosis365, a project which intended to provide a daily one-minute video for a year from people who had a connection to voice hearing / psychosis and who were willing to share what that experience means to them. It didn't last for the full year, but there are still a bunch of great videos that you can watch on Facebook here.
   
2. Louisa D Pearce's video, Hearing Voices: A Deeper Understanding. I discovered Louisa via the Psychois365 project above, and I really value and love her sensitive, compassionate, and wise approach to this whole subject area.
   

[Laird]

I also resonate with a lot (but not all) of what Jerry Marzinsky had to say in his interview with Richard Cox:




Here are some of my thoughts on those resonances as expressed on Skeptiko:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/sc...ost-135884

Just wanted to share that I work as a psychotherapist in a clinical setting in NYC, and we definitely are trained to explore the content of the voices and "delusions", and we would never simply chalk these experiences up to brain chemistry, medicate, and hope for the best. While our clients will receive medication if they choose to take it, our role as talk therapists is to meet the clients where they are, and that includes exploring the meaning of the voices and "delusions" for the client, and supporting them on their path towards whatever outcome they desire. We respect the autonomy of our clients and would never invalidate the reality of their experiences or the paths they choose to take towards "recovery", whatever that might mean for each individual. Just wanted to share the perspective that is shared in my clinic and by many modern psychotherapists. We are trained to respect the client's experience and to value the role voices and "delusions" play in the way that the clients orient themselves to the world.

[Ninshub]

Just to add to what berkelon was saying and that might be of interest to this topic. George Atwood is a clinical psychologist and author who has written about schizophrenia and so forth, but from a phenomenological perspective (and quite in complete opposition to the traditional, medical/disease "objectifying" approach), where the work is about finding the hermeneutic meaning of the voices or "delusions" as berkelon says. Check out his book The Abyss of Madness published a few years ago. He also has a youtube channel where he posted all of the classes he gave in his final year of teaching (before retirement) an introduction to abnormal psychology undergraduate course that really goes beyond what you would normally expect in terms of such an introductory course. He's not shy about promoting his epistemological biases and so on, and so there's the potential to be put off by that if you're coming from an opposite view, and they can be psychologically challenging but very interesting lectures (he includes a lot of stuff on his work with extremely challenging cases).

I bring this up because in a few of these lectures he talks about symptoms related to what are traditionally referred to as symptoms of psychosis or delusions and his understanding of them. I don't have the complete description of the different classes, but I know Course 5 Part 2 talks about the impact of diagnosing somebody as a "schizophrenic". Course 7 Part 2 talks about delusions in a "bipolar" patient. The early parts of Course 8 deals with a person who had received the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and most of Course 9 is about a person with delusions. You may find it worthwhile to wade through some of these. (I know the last lectures have to do mostly with dissociative identity or what was traditionally called split personality.)

Lecture 5 part 2:


Here's the full list of the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...aw-Ma6pdDd

Courtesy of the Daily Grail, here's a Psychology Today blog post entitled "Healthy People Can Hear Voices, Too":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...voices-too

I was a bit surprised by the idea that most people heard mumbling to themselves do so because they are hearing voices. I mumble to myself quite a lot (though usually in private), but that's strictly a monologue.

[Laird]

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, episode one of season six of the BBC's "Jon Ronson On", Voices in the Head (first broadcast 26 April 2011, runtime 27m38s) is relevant to this thread. The broadcaster summarises the programme as:

"Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long."

(I haven't yet listened to this show but definitely intend to).

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, episode one of season six of the BBC's "Jon Ronson On", Voices in the Head (first broadcast 26 April 2011, runtime 27m38s) is relevant to this thread. The broadcaster summarises the programme as:

"Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long."

(I haven't yet listened to this show but definitely intend to).

The story near the end is very good! 

[Laird]

Have now listened to the podcast. Can very much relate to the "commentary" thing. That's mostly how I experience the entities which plague me too, except that whereas Eleanor's entities seemed - in what we heard of her description - to comment entirely on her behaviour, mine also include commentary on my mental activity, especially thoughts, feelings, and intentions. There's also a lot of what I could call "hooking": repeating words or phrases in response to some mental/physical phenomenon of mine so as to have me associate the two, and then (and although I have not experienced this too much, I believe it is their intent) using the "hook" to try to elicit the same phenomenon/response in me at a later time.