Hearing Voices Is Not A Disease

What a joy I am to see the new report published by the clinical psychologists section of the British Psychological Society!

The report is entitled ” Understanding psychosis and schizophrenia : why people sometimes hear voices, believe strange things or seem out of touch and … how to help.” It has just been published (October 13, 2017) and I think it will be very useful for many professionals and users.

To begin with, how it has been done is encouraging: it has been written side by side by a group of expert psychologists from the eight best British universities together with a group of people who have suffered psychosis. That is, from a horizontal place where professionals and patients listen to each other, dialogue and move forward to find the best way to help those who suffer so much from things that apparently only they see, perceive or hear.

To continue, the report notes that what was traditionally termed “psychotic symptoms” can be understood and addressed in the same way as other difficulties traditionally considered milder such as shyness, anxiety or depression.

Finally, they point out that the accent should not be put on convincing the person that they have a disease. In fact, this labeling it as a symptom of illness is only a way of understanding it typical of our culture, but not of many others. Just the opposite of what is still recommended in many places to dedicate a good part of the initial or crisis care to convincing the user or patient that they are sick, which is known as “disease awareness”.

In some of those cultures where the accent is not placed on describing the person as ill, it turns out that many patients live many more years and are more and better integrated into their communities than in the societies where we insist on labeling patients as psychosis or schizophrenia. same experiences. In fact, the latter diagnosis, that of schizophrenia, often turns into an insurmountable sentence, a slab for life.

Rather, this report proposes to deepen understanding of the message that voices bring. Often, they explain, they are a reaction to situations of abuse, violence, racism or poverty and social exclusion. And they emphasize that we need to invest more in preventing all the violence and inequalities that generate so much suffering in our society.

In my experience hearing voices is often the result of giving loudspeakers to the enemy within. Yes, that little character that many people carry inside and that is almost always a reflection of dissociative experiences in early childhood. The enemy within can be the voice that tells anorexic girls to stop eating so that everyone wants them, but also the voice that screams when a young man is exhausted after a night of consuming different types of toxins and asks him to end his life, calling him miserable.

They are extreme examples, but many people go through life knowing that this inner enemy can take over their mind at any moment, which is equivalent to living in fear, very afraid of the mind itself.

That is why I especially liked the British report this statement: “No one can say with certainty what caused the problems of a particular person. The only way is to sit down with them and try to figure it out. “