In Some Cultures People with Schizophrenia Like the Voices They Hear | Hacker News Reader

In Some Cultures People with Schizophrenia Like the Voices They Hear

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71 pointsSandman34 comments

This is an interesting article on a potentially interesting (but paywalled (anyone have a link?) study.

> 20 patients with schizophrenia in San Mateo, California,

One of the criteria for treatment (at least in the UK) would be "Does this interfere with your day to day life?" Friendly voices would tend to not meet that criteria. Modern treatment should include developing ways to live with the voices, rather than just medicating them out.

I'd be interested to see what happens if you include people who hear voices but who are not patients. I know a few people who hear voices, but who describe them as usually okay and only occasionally distressing. They describe similar "providing useful advice" experiences.

Here's someone who describes what hearing voices is like (he hears mostly external voices - a voice which sounds exactly like someone is standing behind you, talking to you, except there isn't anyone there) and an internal voice. He describes some of these as distressing and frustrating, but he talks about the first experiences as being friendly. And that, from the little bit I've heard, is a reasonably common experience even in the west.

(He talks about some distressing events from his childhood, so go careful)

https://youtu.be/LNAuckNrC34?t=15m20s

...which (if I understand correctly) seeks to de-stigmatize/re-characterize the hearing-of-voices as something that's not necessarily an illness requiring a cure, but a condition of mixed-utility to be coped with.

https://www.academia.edu/15399080/Hearing_Voices_in_differen...

Hearing voices in itself is not a symptom of an illness. Even in our culture some people cope really well with hearing voices. For example lonely old people may feel that they have company when they hear voices.

Some facts:

http://www.intervoiceonline.org/about-voices/essential-facts

It depends on how you define illness. Something can have no negative effects and still be wrong. Compare a missing small toe, perhaps.

>Between 70 and 90 cent of people who hear voices do so following traumatic events.

That sort of implies that things are not 100% okay in there.

> Something can have no negative effects and still be wrong.

But we have to be careful, because the tendency is to say that common variations (those we are accustomed to) are "right" and uncommon variations (those that surprise us) are "wrong", even when there's no sensible categorical difference between them.

Sure, but it's a touchy subject because people can be deprived of their liberty, held in hospital against their will, taken to that hospital by police sometimes, and medicated against their will.

There's a push from people who hear voices but who are not distressed or controlled by those voices to medicate as little as possible. It's a reasonable request, especially because we don't know a huge amount about hearing voices.

Something can have no negative effects and still be wrong.

If there are no negative effects, what makes it wrong?

Compare a missing small toe, perhaps.

Or missing tonsils, or a missing appendix, or ....

To what extent do toes help with balance, say while walking or running?

It's worth noting that recovery outcomes for schizophrenia are dramatically better in the developing world compared to the developed world, where schizophrenia is treated like a medical disease and schizophrenics are horrible pariahs who are made to wander the street and eat trash (at least this is the case in the US). See http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/4... e.g., amongst many other studies establishing this trend.

I find it fascinating to try to elucidate what exactly that "inner voice" we hear is, and why we consider it less of a hallucination than other "hallucinatory" voices. Because "I" control it? But then who is the I?

Related to meditation/mindfulness, I like to try to "get in front of" the inner voice. If I control it, I should be able to know what words it will use before it "speaks" them, right? I find if direct my attention to my inner voice, I can begin to sense the ideas and words just before they're internally spoken, but that attention tends to disrupt the normal monkey-mind rambling of words, or to cause me to switch to a more internal/less linear and concrete/more wordless mode of thought.

But in the end, other than what seems a relatively illusory sense of "control" over "the" voice, I'm not sure I understand the supposed difference between our internal monologue and "hearing voices", beyond the stigma or negativity of it (but doesn't most people's internal monologue get pretty negative sometimes?)

Further reading: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes

A beautifully written book about an excentric theory of the history of consciousness.

Well, some obvious probable historic figures who may have had more supportive cultural backgrounds include

- Abraham, whose voice first said kill your son, then changed its mind.

- Joan of Arc - who gave surprisingly good military advice

- presumably every "spirit guide"

There must be more examples, but hard to think of them

- Socrates - (wikipedia) Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daimōnic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός apotreptikos) inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as daimōnic may suggest that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. Today, such a voice would be classified under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a command hallucination.

Interesting I did not know that. Thank you.

Would be useful if it truly was a "divine dialog".

You look like you are about to have an affair that will trigger divorce. "Are you sure? Y/N"

I have a theory that schizophrenic voices are actually one's own suppressed will or access to the subconscious in compromised or traumatized individuals, or possibly communication with the recessive hemisphere of the brain.

I'd like to learn more about psychiatry to really understand what we know (or think we know) about schizophrenia.

Fun fact: One charge against Socrates, the founder of western philosophy, for which he was put to death, was for hearing voices... that weren't Greek gods, but were 'other gods.' And talking about it. Preaching other gods being punishable by... death.

The Greeks were all about bringing in other gods tho, like Cybele.

One gets the feeling it was an old law nobody thought about?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

Nice article on the differences between people's "style of thinking". It takes visual mental imagery as an example, and I can see auditory hallucinations being on a very similar spectrum (if you take away the stigma). In the visualization debate non-visual thinkers often report being able to visualize in a hypnagogic state (right before falling asleep), which is also the state in which (surprisingly many) people experience auditory hallucinations.

Interesting - I regularly hear music before falling asleep. I'm always sad that I never have the wherewithal to hum it into my phone.

This is interesting! Especially the notion that some regions have predominantly helping "voices"!

This brings me to a crazy idea - can we think of any test that would allow us to decide whether indeed somebody else is using those brains? I.e. if we hypothetically assume we are living in a kind of simulation/virtual world/etc., there might be some number of agents outside directly interfering with the running of the world and a person suffering from schizophrenia could be the one directly affected by such an actor.

If we are indeed in something akin to a "virtual machine", allowing our world to be "interrupted" at any time, outside tampered with the intent of directing events towards a desired outcome, can we somehow detect this kind of tampering?

If we assume there is a VM we are in, can we computationally recognize that by constructing some problem that can reveal the nature of our universe? In other words, leaving the assumption the world is physical behind and instead operating under assumption the world is actually computational.

It's interesting that some mystics or philosophers hint at computational parts, like the nature of time by Augustine of Hippo from 4th century AD(!), or Emmerich mentioning a "Google"-like search performed inside Godhead etc. I am curious what the various cultures discovered regarding such computability and if we indeed can bring pieces of mosaic together and test it out? Is what we call "magic" basically invoking some undocumented services of the world's hypervisor?

Many of you are romanticizing "hearing voices" but is mostly because you don't know what that's really like, is not like talking to the mirror or "hearing your conscience". I had a friend with Schizophrenia and she cried every single day, many times she wanted to die just to make her pain go away, she tried every possible drug (legal or otherwise), the level of unrest and anxiety that she had to go through is not something I desire even upon the worst human beings.

I think that just like the brain is likely the most powerful machine in the world, when it goes bad is also the most damaging machine in the world for the person who has it.

I would not romanticize your friend's pain and suffering.

My take on the article is that hearing voices does not equate to suffering in all cases. There may be cultural or other influences involved.

> "The screaming, fighting ... [they say] jump in front of the train," one US participant said.

> The voices upset them because they violate their sense of personal control, the researchers said.

The voice is not just upsetting b/c they conflict with expectations of how the mind works but those expectations will directly affect what the voice will say and how b/c the voice is part of that person.

Personally, I always wondered why nobody wondered why those "voices" tend to be destructive (at least in our western hemisphere). Now my question is partly answered with the information that this observation is not globally valid.

According to what I have read (not directly experienced), most schizophrenics experience a split - they see the world as divided into 'good' and 'evil' forces, which might manifest as spirits or voices or whatever, and might be embodied in the form of demons or the CIA or communists on the one hand, or angels/guardians on the other. I have been really into this interview with John Weir Perry, a fascinating psychologist who had some radical notions about what he called the 'renewal process' based on his work with patients in San Francisco: http://global-vision.org/papers/JWP.pdf

Of course, in the West these places are called churches. Many people with schizophrenia say they see heavenly figures and talk to them, they are called prophets who receive "revelations" from god.

Yep. I think one reason religions spread and became common is that humanity simply didn't know any better. Today we would diagnose supernatural experiences as mental disorders. Back then, they were "witnessing miracles" or "conversing with God".

Voices?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Julian Jaynes]

Yes. A plausible explanation of our cultural prejudice against "hearing voices". An amazing and thought provoking book. Even if you don't agree with his thesis. Highly recommended.

Sometimes the best conversations we have, are the ones with ourself

  > In Some Cultures...

Which would imply that in other cultures, this is not the case. And, based on the wording of this headline, would further suggest that such circumstances vary statistically (...or maybe just anecdotally) at the cultural level?

So, what cultures provoke the no-so-nice voices. And what does that say about the culture in question?

Or maybe it's all just link bait.

Maybe.

From the article:

> They found that people from the US tended to describe the voices as intrusive unreal thoughts they hated. In contrast, people from South India were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance, and people from Ghana were more likely to think of them as morally good.

You are getting down-voted for not reading the article before commenting.

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