The position of the hearing voices movement can be summarised as follows:
Hearing Voices Movement – Wikipedia
- Hearing voices is not in itself a sign of mental illness.
- Hearing voices is part of the diversity of being a human, it is a faculty that is common (3-10% of the population will hear a voice or voices in their lifetime) and significant.
- Hearing voices is experienced by many people who do not have symptoms that would lead to diagnosis of mental illness.
- Hearing voices is often related to problems in life history.
- If hearing voices causes distress, the person who hears the voices can learn strategies to cope with the experience.
- Coping is often achieved by confronting the past problems that lie behind the experience.
“There is nothing inherently, ontologically, transhistorically pathological about hearing voices.”
La Marr Jurelle Bruce in How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity
We need to understand how hearing voices is a human experience and response.
If neurodiversity refers to the different ways that we interact with and experience the world around us, hearing voices surely counts as a unique way of experiencing the world. While Western psychiatry frames voice hearing as a symptom of an illness, this doesn’t accurately represent the experience of voice hearing across history and cultures.
In many cultures, voice hearing has spiritual, cultural and ancestral significance. As a result, they see their voices as helpful, positive, calming, or simply the norm. For some Indigenous people here in so-called Australia, hearing voices is seen as a normal cultural experience in certain contexts. In New Zealand, some voice hearing experiences are explained by Kaitiaki; a spiritual guardian.
There are many other cultures where individuals have different relationships with their voices. Even within Western society, individuals have different relationships with their voices where the voices aren’t negative, scary or distressing. We continue to assume hearing voices is a sign of an illness or disorder but that just isn’t the case for everyone.
In fact, voice hearing is a more common human experience than we realise. The Hearing Voices Movement has continuously advocated for us to understand voices as a human response instead of an illness. As Understanding Voices explains, we all have the capacity for hearing voices but how, when, where and why we may experience voices differs.
If we can recognise voice hearing as a human experience, we are giving each individual the autonomy to make sense and meaning of their own experience.
Living with Voices
Accepting voices means accepting the reality of the voices for the voice hearer; it means becoming interested in the different aspects of the experience and in the relationship between the voices and the events of the hearer’s life.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme
Voice hearers become ill, in the sense of becoming dysfunctional, as a result of not being able to cope with their voices and the problems that lie at their roots. Why? Because these problems are hard to live with and knock people out of emotional balance, both personally as well as in their relationships with important others. They didn’t find psychiatry helpful because in psychiatry hearing voices is seen as a result of a disease, and not as a reaction to problems in life that make people feel powerless. The person’s problems are thus neglected and seen as irrelevant, making the solving of their life problems more problematic. Voice hearers in psychiatry are mostly approached only in relation to their symptoms, and not as people with problems and possibilities.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme | Open Library
…a recovery approach is more satisfactory then a cure approach because hearing a voice is not a sign of pathology but a signal of existing problems.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme | Open Library
To recover, voice hearers learn to cope with the social and emotional consequences of their original problems. In the recovery process they will recognise the relationship between their voices and their emotions and what has happened to them. They also get a better view of the power relationship between themselves and their voices. The anxiety, powerlessness, guilt feelings, etc., are metaphors of the power relationship in the traumatic situation and the emotional neglect period. In the recovery process, they will take back power and will express their own power in relation to their voices and their problems. They also create choices that make it possible to take responsibility for their life and emotions, and by doing so heighten their self-esteem. Gradually they discover that voices are expressing emotions, and these emotions are those the voice hearer experienced as the result of the traumatic situation. The recovery process is one of turning points in the relationship with the voices, with the person becoming more powerful and independent. This is what we see as the approach that leads to recovery. It doesn’t make sense to attempt to cure signals of problems, and it’s not an approach that is particularly successful either because the traumatic background is not recognised and the emotions involved are not coped with. Voices are the stories of threatening emotions; emotions of the person twisted by terrible experiences, hopelessness, feelings of guilt, aggression and anxiety. In the stories of this book you will read again and again about the relationship between trauma, emotional neglect, other stressful problems and hearing voices, because of the overwhelming emotions related to these traumas.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme | Open Library
From understanding the perspective of the voice hearer, we have observed that the attitude of mental healthcare researchers and professionals is one of regarding voices not as a source of information, but as a sign of a ‘nonexistent’ reality; it is this attitude that disables people from finding more adequate and helpful information about this experience.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme
…recovery from the distress of hearing voices is only possible when the voices become accepted as a human capacity that can have a function in the person’s life, and can be used to help voice hearers develop themselves.
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by M. A. J. Romme | Open Library
They have discovered that their voices are not a sign of madness but a reaction to problems in their lives that they couldn’t cope with, and they have found that there is a relationship between the voices and their life story, that the voices talk about problems that they haven’t dealt with – and that they therefore make sense.
Psychosis as a personal crisis by M. A. J. Romme | Open Library
