A lot of "voice hearing" isn't an auditory experience at all

The message from recent surveys is that it's not just people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who hear voices in their heads,many people considered mentally well do to. This revelation may have a welcome de-stigmatising effect in terms of how people think about some of the symptoms associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, buta new study published inPsychosis asks us to hang on a minute – to say that one "hears voices" can mean different things to different people. You might assume that "hears voices" means that a person has an hallucinated auditory experience just like someone is talking to them. But what about hearing an inner voice that is experienced like an out-of-control th ought rather than an external voice? Or a heard voice that's not like either a thought or an external voice?Our knowledge of the experience of voice hearing among patients has been limited by the fact that a lot of psychiatric research in this area (thoughnot all) has been categorical in nature. For instance, a typical psychiatric scale used in research or the clinic includes a vague item like "[Patient] Reports voices than no one else hears" and a tick here can conceal a huge range of different experiences.For the new research, Nev Jones and Tanya Luhrmann conducted in-depth interviews with 80 people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the US, India and Ghana about their first-hand experiences of hearing voices. There was great variety between participants in their descriptions of voice hearing a...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: blogs