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, but a new study published in Psychosis 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 thought 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 (though not 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 and also within each individual participant's own descriptions. Perhaps most importantly, while 79 per cent of the participants reported at least some limited experience of the hallucinated sound of external voices – as if someone was audibly speaking to them – a much smaller proportion (17.5 per cent) said this was their dominant experience of "voice hearing".
Source material from BPS Research Digest