Hearing Voices: A Completely Unremarkable Experience (for some)

(I want to preface this post with this: I will not be talking about the auditory hallucinations of people with psychotic illnesses. This is more vague. It is just about the idea of auditory hallucinations and the baseline stigma surrounding them. In future posts, I will write more about what auditory hallucinations are like for people living with schizophrenia and what my personal experience with them has been. I hope you check back in later to read those.)

Auditory hallucinations, by and large, are NOT solely a phenomenon sequestered to those with a psychotic illness.

Auditory hallucinations are false perceptions of noise (aka hearing a noise that does not exist).

You’ve hallucinated – alone in your house and you hear your name called, the chime of your cellphone but no notification, or the inner voice that narrates what you’re doing.

Don’t worry! You’re not crazy.

These are normal, and nearly everyone experiences these hallucinations on a semi-regular basis. This is not a cause for concern; you likely aren’t concerned because these are easy to identify and only really impact your life in the subtlest of ways.

Even though these are normal, routine occurrences, talking about these small hallucinations is something you’ve been taught, explicitly or implicitly, not to talk about – certainly not with a doctor.

We fear hallucinations, but we shouldn’t.

In 1973, an academic paper was published titled, “On being sane in insane places.” This was a result of a psychological study by Stanford University now known as the Rosenhan Experiment. The study was rather simplistic and completely alarming to the nature of the stigma surrounding auditory hallucinations, specifically by the medical community.

Rosenhan along with handful of students admitted themselves into different psychiatric hospitals. The only thing these psuedopatients claimed to as the reason for why they wanted to check themselves in was that they were hearing voices. Everything else about their medical and psychological history was authentic. All they did was lie about “the voices.”

The results were that all of them were diagnosed with a psychotic illness, given strong anti-psychotic medication, and kept in the hospital for an average of 19 days.

That's just the completely misplaced stigma from the medical community. I'll write more about my specific experiences with stigma with members of the medical community. But, for now, let's talk a little about the stigma that exists in the general public.

If I could conduct my own study, I’d make it really simple. For now, I’ll just leave it up to whoever read this to give my experiment a try.

(If you chose to try it, please let me know the results)

Here it is:

Step 1) (those of you without a psychotic illness) text a few friends or family members and tell them you heard a voice telling you to clean your house.

Step 2) just listen to the responses

My hypothesis is some form of “negative” or “cause for concern” reaction.

I had a friend send that text to her mom, and my hypothesis was proven true. Her mom’s response “oh, wow, that’s so scary.”

(Yes, that’s just one example, but if I get some responses of people trying my little experiment, I’ll do a follow up and talk about the results.)

The study is simple. It’s just an affirmation of the stigma that I’ve experience my entire adult life living with schizophrenia. Living with a symptom attached to something that people fear even though they do, to some degree, understand.

Hallucinations are . . . (insert the response here).

Stigma is toxic and rampant. Everyone I know living with a mental illness has a unique story about how stigma has impacted them. Although it can vary from minor inconveniences of having to side step a conversation to life-altering things like being bullied for being different, stigma stands in the way of seeing a person for who they are.

With schizophrenia, the stigma is everywhere - I hear things, see things, and can even sometimes believe things that aren't true or real. It has, in the past, kept me from pursing jobs or relationships. I know my illness is going to keep me from doing certain things in life, but life would be much easier if the first road block wasn't just the useless nature and existence of stigma.

In the future, I would love to have some of these people share their stories with you of how their lives have been impacted in a myriad of ways because of stigma. If you want to share your story with me (and potentially with the readers of this blog), reach out to me.

Stigma exists because we refuse to talk about an issue.

Let’s all be a little rebellious and start talking about shit.