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Comment by MichailP | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience with milder form of depression, is that you can significantly help yourself by stop taking your thoughts that seriously. Everything you think about yourself and the world is just thoughts. So it helps if you go meta - i.e start thinking about what you are thinking. In the article, one man had constant voice in his head ordering him to do stuff. If one is able to look at it from another angle, and to instead of trying to do stuff the voice tells, for example start marveling at human intelligence that is able to think in sound! Not just sound, we can think in all the ways we experience the world. Through abstract thought, sounds, visually, through movement ... Help yourself, go meta :)

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My thoughts and experience exactly. But then: Do we know that everybody else can manage that level of self-insight? I have had prolonged and very close contact with severely affected bipolars. None of them seemed capable in any way whatsoever to take that crucial step backwards and look at themselves from a somewhat more external vantage point. My feeling - nothing else - tells me that that failure was part and parcel of their illness.

I agree completely.

It seems that the ability to think about thinking and having an outside view of yourself is the big difference between sanity and insanity.

The sane man knows himself to be a fool while the insane man believes himself to be sane.

I have bipolar 1. What I do is "go meta" and think over the situation and discuss it, how I feel, and how I perceive the situation with a friend or counselor to sanity check. There are times when this fails (co-morbid anxiety disorders), but I find being able to talk through a situation helps immensely. Most of the time, I can even reason out of an anxiety attack or panic attack if I have support close by.

Groups for people who hear voices talk about roughly similar coping mechanisms.

It can be a bit tricky, because for some people the voice is as real as an actual person standing behind you and talking would be, except there's no one there.

That provides an extra level of challenge to ignore.

Here's a short interview clip from someone who lives alongside voices: https://twitter.com/BBCBreakfast/status/859351603131936768

Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) offers kind of a spiritual framework that has this notion as a core component, in case anyone is looking for a "guided" way to try this approach. I think it is well worth investigating.

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