For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful
aeon.co
aeon.co
> We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience.
In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/
I've wondered if there is some sort of feedback loop where western culture associates hallucination with possession, while other cultures may see hallucinations in a more positive light, or even as a sign that you are some sort of shaman.
Believing voices in our head are causally powerful (as in deities) really reminds me of the theory of consciousness appearing from the collapse of the bicameral mind. Here's a good introduction to this idea: https://youtu.be/lgnMyF-o0sQ
Seriously, it's something I've never thought about, but once you hear "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" you kinda know what the theory is and it makes sense.
They did say that he had something there. AFAIK they didn't say that he spawned a whole field of research, though.
I assume the same. It's just that there is something nice about a theory that basically tells you the core of what you need to know from the name of it.
"We're making a new movie. It's called 'Snakes on a Plane' "
"Oh? What's it about?"
Consciousness might not be as essential to the human experience as is generally believed now a days. What percentage of the day are we really engaged in conscious rational thought anyways? And is it really what makes us human, or do subconscious processes play a much bigger role in the human experience than reason?
I have bipolar disorder and I accidentally ingested LSD at a festival by kissing someone who had just taken a tab on their tongue. I wasn’t aware that this could happen, yet it happened.
The next day I woke up with a Voice. It appeared to me to be the voice of God. It was very difficult to go against it but I could negotiate. It told me things that it couldn’t possibly know, like that I should ask a stranger for a cigarette so I could later get a towel when I needed it.
It seemed to have powers of foreshadowing and it would seemingly tell me things before they happened.
It was also a trickster and it would play cruel jokes on me. After a while it became hard for me to take.
At the same music festival I met a lady who would make songs just by looking at you. I carefully realised that she was likely in something like a permanent psychedelic state, which I had been before due to my bipolar condition. I asked her this directly and she confirmed it. She said I was one of the few people who could see it!
I had purchased a ticket to her retreat. So a month after the festival I went to her retreat. It was a very difficult time and the voice was giving me a lot of trouble.
I went to the song lady. I told her about my condition (the voice had told me to go and tell her!). She thought about it and said ok, I will help you, and you cannot do the retreat.
She then did a session with me where she told me where she saw the entity - she called it a “walk in” spiritual entity, and said that because I’m very “open” with my bipolar, adding the LSD made me even more open, it happened that a “walk in” sneaked inside.
She said she saw the entity down my legs, and kidneys, and she helped me expel it. She then taught me I could “close the door” to prevent it getting in.
My condition was immediately much better.
When she expelled the voice from my body, she spoke exactly like the voice spoke, telling me that the entity wanted to leave, didn’t really fight the expulsion, using the same tone of voice and words that I’d gotten used that the Voice would use. It was inexplicable and amazing.
Now I still have a voice, but it’s a whisper in comparison. It tells me things, still seems to have some ability to warn me about the future (it’s debatable how much of this is connecting the dots later of course, but it has done some odd things, like warned me I wouldn’t go to certain places).
Since the experience is not as intense, and I’ve lived enough to realise it’s not omnipotent or always right, I roll with it.
I have no scientific explanation for what happened to me.
I was so so lucky I was right next to one when it happened to me.
It was like someone doing a spot on Jack Nicholson impression, but Jack Nicholson was an invisible man in my head. How can one explain that?
She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.
Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.
Can you elaborate? I tried to keep a neutral tone.
People can mix up exact details and whether two things feel the same in that amount of time, especially if they recently took drugs.
> Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.
Look, you specifically asked for a skeptical explanation. You're right that it's not a disproof, but it does mean your experience isn't particularly convincing as an anecdote.
It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).
Just because our current understanding hasn’t got all the answers doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, that’s the way I see it.
I think some things that we think of as supernatural now will have an “explanation” later. How much later I don’t know.
Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays.
Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).
I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.
The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is.
The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.
You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
You're focused on unknown mechanisms for easily verifiable observations, while my focus is on the (lack of) proof that the song lady actually observed anything at all. For all I know she just listened to what you said and went along with it.
To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.
But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.
To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.
The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.
And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.
> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.
At this point I have no idea, but it's an interesting hypothesis to your question. If dark energy exists, and we never figure out exactly what it is, is it possible that when we take LSD we're actually perceiving it, or some equivalent part of the universe that's non-visible?
I mean if we have non-visible dark energy and dark matter, who is to say that when we solve dark matter/energy, we don't again go back to figuring out that "another 90%" of the universe is detectable but unexplainable? What if the borders of our knowledge will always remain incomplete?
> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much
Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.
At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
> At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have.
No, we don't. I'll even refer you to an expository article that describes some studies about what you are probably alluding to, and you can let me know how you think it adequately accounts for the parent's story [0].
Spoiler: it requires someone taking the effort to implant the memories (a pretty significant caveat worth mentioning, I would think), and I've certainly never seen it applied to some ongoing thing like a disembodied voice with apparent agency.
But even where memory implantation is relatively accepted ala coercive police interrogations, the mechanism in the brain is unknown. Was a new memory implanted or was a subject simply gaslit into remembering the conversation with the interrogator? Where in the brain is that belief encoded? How can it be simulated? Did the parent never experience a voice then? They just have a continuously updating memory being implanted by some researcher? You clearly haven't thought this through, so don't be so quick to shut it down.
The reality is that none of us here have a good explanation for the parent's experience -- brains are barely understood at all. Your skepticism to the parent's interpretation is fine, but your attempt to discredit with a blanket cop out statement that lacks any mechanism or reproducibility on the scale of the parent's story only serves to let you keep pretending like you know everything.
[0] https://www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/auto/2013/10/5/59413507/F...
To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.
I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.
Practically though, there could be problems if the research interferes with a big industry, or disrupts 'well established practices'. Or if it damages the professional reputations of important people, or clashes with 'belief perseverance', or makes powerful people look bad, or makes the university likely to lose funding, or goes against the current cancellation third rail, etc, etc.
There's no shortage of historical examples: tobacco health research, Semmelweis, plate tectonics (!), lockdown cost benefit analyses, etc.
There was very little 'science' in outlawing cannabis research for decades. Same goes for MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc, all with massive therapeutic potential that has been held back for decades by politics & industry.
Point being that it's entirely possible for the perceived sequence of events as described in the anecdote above to be true as experienced by that person, without the need for anything supernatural going on.
I would be curious to know why you think that scientific explanations will get more, not less, supernatural in the next 20 years.
EDIT: dug up the article https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
Good read, and it also parallels discussions in mental health forums where people with dissociative mental health issues generally recommend against meditation, or at least some types of meditation (e.g. walking meditiation is ok, watching your observer/stillness/awareness types are not).
A. It’s psychosis
B. It’s a spiritual entity that walked into me, just as the song lady said.
C. I should continue taking my medication.
D. I should also take care of myself spiritually and accept there are things I cannot understand completely
I honestly cannot say if it’s just a part of me. At one point I thought so, I thought it was my “intuition” embodied and removed from myself. But the voice played a trick on me and told me to trust someone I shouldn’t have. And then I realised A. I can’t trust it blindly and B. It doesn’t know everything. So C. It’s just saying whatever the hell it wants to say. It has opinions.
However, further proof of its bizarre nature is its continuing ability to predict the future. Granted, it’s much inferior to the original Voice, but it’s still there and it’s still bizarre. For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.
As far as driving me insane, I don’t have a great answer. I deal with it day to day. The effect of the voice under my bipolar medication is subdued. I know now that if I raise my medication I can make it even less intense. It’s just part of my condition now, and I fight it when I need to and roll with it if I don’t.
I know it’s perfectly fascinating and odd and even I would have a hard time believing in me 5 years ago.
For fun you could also keep track of other related data. How far fetched the prediction is. How confident the voice is. The time frame of the prediction. Just an idea...
The voice always speaks in the same tone.
Predictions are usually something I want to do or am planning to do. Plans it usually tells me as soon as they are conceived. Predictions come often when I am making plans, it tells me whether they will work or not.
HOWEVER, to answer your question, such an exercise could be totally futile as in actuality it changes its mind a lot. Sometimes it tells me something I intend to do won't work, without divulging why. I try it anyway and it kinda works, and I figure out why the point of failure. I fix it, and now the voice tells me it will work now, making the initial prediction kind of moot.
Sometimes something happens and something the voice initially thought was a great idea it now says will be an absolute failure. By that time I am often committed so I tell it there's no choice now, we can only keep going, and it kinda agrees and we do the thing anyway. Sometimes the voice is just plain wrong about things.
The predictions aren't so much predictions as they are opinions. Also, studying it with too hard a lens seems to bring out the worse in the condition, so I avoid it.
It would, however, require a lot of commitment from the patient and willingness to face the condition and even make the symptoms worse. And, considering how crude our tools are at this stage, wouldn’t likely yield much useful information.
You aren’t alone friend. This type of thing happens to me regularly enough, and with an unlikely & surprising amount of detail, that it is impossible to write off as coincidence and too specific & detailed to be some kind of subconscious “impression” rising the conscious level.
I don’t hear a voice though, when it happens it just appears in my mind fully realized and I feel a “certainty” in my solar plexus region.
We have many models of reality available to us (whether we're talking "statistical mechanics" or "quantum chromodynamics" or "chakra energies"). Categorizing them as "True" or "False" is not very useful (is Newtonian physics "True" or "False"?). Rather, we should be content with judging our models by whether they are _useful_, and that judgement must be made contextually.
Having a mechanistic view of your experiences grounded in neuroscience is useful: It suggests that you should take your medication and that probably helps.
Having a spiritual understanding of your relationship to your experiences caused you to do things that helped you and made your life better. Does that mean that model is "True"? Who cares. It's sort of a meaningless question. It was a useful model, and that's all there is.
Somewhat relatedly, I was quite influenced by this (unfinished) work: https://metarationality.com/
Also, I've seen and experienced too much to just say "it's not a spiritual being". I have compelling evidence that indeed, something was passed between me and the Shaman Song Lady that day, even though it would be impossible to prove.
Before the voice did you have an inner monologue.
If so how did it differ? How does the current voice differ from the inner monologue?
I pondered whether that was it, that the LSD had just shattered my psyche in a way that I was hearing voices when they were once part of me. However for many reasons I don’t think that anymore, not 100% anyway.
Also, the “resolution” at the end that one might (meaninglessly) apply the word placebo to isn’t the interesting part IMO. What is interesting is seeing where our understanding of the human brain fits/predicts or fails to fit experiences like this.
I am an academic PI, and my research on brain energy metabolism is close enough to what we are talking about here that I don't need to look on wikipedia to tell you our current level of understanding doesn't offer anything close to a mechanistic explanation for experiences like this.
Some of my research has been inspired by thinking about peoples surprising anecdotal experiences and stories- and then investigating what that might imply about the underlying biology.
You seem to subscribe to a kind of scientism where genuine scientific curiosity and frank discussion about the gaps in our understanding is unacceptable. Your combination of being completely ignorant and condescending at the same time is awful.
I am generally very open minded and curious about peoples claims of supernatural and spiritual experiences. I believe it all has understandable mechanistic biological explanations, but I am very curious what they may be.
The world is not as the scientific rational model would have one believe. These substances show that indigenous cultures are thousands of years ahead of western society when it comes to understanding consciousness.
For anyone on the outside reading this; I can recommend The BBC's LSD The Beyond Within as a starting point.
It's not the world that is not rational, it's humans' mind. Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.
As humans we experience the world through our six sense doors e.g. eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch and mind.
To try and separate the world from our minds is non trivial. It is our very mind that allows us to perceive the world.
> Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.
The matrices you describe are the sense doors.
I didn't imply that anything necessitates a higher power. If you are happier to exclude the notion I described from your world view that's okay. I'm not forcing you to be open minded!
I rather meant the logic gates ;) Or, more seriously, I was talking about the parts of the brain that handle language and reasoning, plus the memory bits.
I’m surprised that you have added “mind” as a sensory system of some kind, next to actual senses (I don’t think it is a sense of any kind on its own). Not sure what you meant, sorry.
Negotiation means bidirectional communication, right? So... have you tried running any tests on that voice?
I mean... I suspect everyone poked LLMs with a stick to some extent, probing their capabilities. I could be wrong, but I think it must be extremely natural for any human to interrogate anything unknown that exhibits any signs of potential consciousness. I cannot chat with my inner monologue as if it would be an independent entity (it simply isn't - just the same me), and this sounds like your Voice presented a personality and even an agency of its own.
It told me once that I would make love to a beautiful woman once. I joined a song circle and helped this really beautiful woman build her song. It then told me "there's a lot of different ways of making love". That one was not the worse, but it kept teaching me lessons through weird paradoxes like that, to break me open and rebuild me.
It also told me once that my tent was going to get robbed at the festival, unless I rushed in and got to it rapidly. I almost ran there, and everything was fine. It just laughed in my face, and said something cruel I don't even remember now.
Non-religious people were escaping pious people. But unbeknownst to either group, their God was a quantifiable being that could only inhabit higher order organisms experiencing a trauma, and then stay inside their minds, and help it interact in our plane of existence.
Might be some merit to this idea, given the shared experiences many psychedelic users have. Frequently there are some entities that were always there, just not perceptible.
I think it's possible, let's say that the spiritual hypothesis is true and I took in a spiritual being. The Shaman's description was that I am already "open" from bipolar, and I was "too open" after I took LSD, letting a walk-in sneak inside.
I have a lot of trauma, and I mean serious abuse, coming in from childhood. That I believe is correlated with me having bipolar.
So my idea is as follows - we know that the edges of mental illness like mine can be caused by trauma, often times because the mind is "protecting you" from the abuse in some extreme way that leads eventually to mental illness. In a way, the mind is running away from the traumatic event, it for instance often erases the trauma years from memory (something that's happened to me). So the mind is protecting you by removing you from reality.
The thing is - we say the mind is removing you and running away but to where?
My perception now is the mind "escapes" into the other world. The spiritual, mushroom, LSD world we perceive and learn from when under psychedelics. That means people with mental illness, like me, get to have psychedelic experiences naturally (my manic episodes pretty much match descriptions of LSD trips, and they don't go away, so I can stay in them for a week+). That means our mind, the mind of those heavily traumatized, is already "in between" worlds.
Having your foot in the other world, the Psilocybin-psychedelic-spiritual world, means you're protected somehow. Somehow, it actually works. Your mind knows what it's doing. Your mind is able to enter a psychedelic or latent psychedelic state to protect itself from the real world being too dark, too grim, and too horrible to think about/remember. In one hand, you could say it explains bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. if the mind is just protecting itself from true horror.
"Normal" people, or neuronormal people, who haven't experienced a lot of trauma, then find it immensely therapeutic to experience the Psilocybin / psychedelic / spiritual world for a few moments, thanks to the chemical changes of taking LSD or your drug of choice. And then they came back.
What happened to deeply traumatized people through trauma happens to neuronormal folks artificially through the introduction of a chemical change. But that chemical change happens naturally in heavily traumatized people, who had to use the same mechanisms to escape reality when they were young, thus "breaking their brain" a bit under conventional psychology. So it could be the mind knows enough to break into a psychedelic state for self protection, which is fascinating to think about!
But when someone like ME takes psychedelics however, someone loaded with trauma, we go too far and we don't come back quite the same. I suspect that explains why some people benefit immensely from LSD and Psilocybin for trauma, coming back healed, and why some people like me, it will just induce a psychotic episode.
Basically regular people get to do a shallow visit to the psychedelic-spiritual world, while people with heavy trauma go WAY TOO DEEP and lose themselves. That's what we call a psychotic episode.
That's because people with trauma are already one foot in the psychedelic world, or they have to go way too deep to find the origins of their trauma, and they "break". The sad reality is that shallow trauma is easier to treat, even in the psychedelic state, while deep trauma might just lead to a psychotic episode.
I have no idea whether this holds up or not, it's been something I think about ever since that experience.
My first two years after a hero LSD trip had me trying to parse the extended reality. I don’t have BPD or any voices so my experience is more recreational than yours. Now I just appreciate it without a need for explanation. I’m open to more research on the matter, but not holding my breath or speculating on it. I just like that so many other people have experienced it, and that I can tell they have.
So my first bipolar psychotic episode (or psychedelic episode, which I prefer) was in 2017. January February.
Then the LSD trip was in August 2023. Last year. It was funny because I went to that festival really wanting to try psychedelics in some safe way if I found out how.
I always felt like people who had done them and had good trips seemed to know something I really wanted to know, if that makes sense?
I think Ram Dass described it well. Some people after LSD look like they “get it”, and if you haven’t done it you wonder what the heck “it” is!
So the fact that I got a low dose of LSD through kissing someone, it was like the universe was teasing me and trying to both enlighten me and give me some advice - “here’s how it feels” and “it’s really dangerous for you”. It was a beautiful, transcendent and violent experience.
Was this before or after the mud ;)
Yeah there is something to appreciate about the journey
I went to the mud everyday brother
I’ve never felt so cleansed
(I’m assuming we are talking about a certain event that happens every 2 years in southern Europe!)
Also, trauma and drugs could be two of several ways of becoming open to the other world. Another could be genetic. Or there could be multiple other worlds or different categories of spiritual beings, some people susceptible to some and others to others.
Bipolar/schizophrenia are often very genetic, they run in families.
No, I don't "hear it using my ears" in the conventional sense. So I've spoken to other people who hear voices in my podcast about Bipolar condition (let me know if you want a link). The voices often have a definite physical location, even though they are not there. One person told me it was like two people behind them in the queue for a movie. She would overhear them behind her. Another person told me it would sound like was coming from the apartment above. Again sounded very real.
For me its like in the right lower abdomen. It emanates from there.
Because of this I never confuse with a person.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004180/
>Two homogeneous subgroups of patients were defined based on the hallucination spatial location: patients with only outer space hallucinations (N = 12) and patients with only inner space hallucinations (N = 15). Between-group differences were then assessed using 2 complementary brain morphometry approaches: voxel-based morphometry and sulcus-based morphometry. Convergent anatomical differences were detected between the patient subgroups in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ).
That's for you specifically, but in the general case, it is not always easy to know if the voice came from a real person or not, right?
If the source of the Voice is your own brain then I assume the things it tells you are based on your own life experiences, is that right? Has the Voice ever given you any insights on a problem you are working on? Like for example things come to some people in a dream, so I assume the Voice can give you new insights too? Does the Voice usually only say things on certain topics, or category of topics? Or can it be on any topic, just like dreams?
The cure is explainable - an authority telling you something about your mental state that changes it is hypnotherapy. It helps to write it out that way. It's just someone suggesting you do something and then you agree to do it. The difference is you don't feel like you agreed.
Recursively, some people occasionally end up with stuck habits from trying hypnosis that they don't "actually want" (ie consciously), and one thing that works to fix this is saying to yourself "that's just my imagination and I can stop if I want to."
I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".
Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):
A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?
B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)
A. Both.
I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.
You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.
Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.
https://open.spotify.com/show/2RgP7lRoyBzz6ATlTT4lG5
Episodes 3 and 4 both have people who heard voices in their past, and their descriptions are very interesting.
I suspect I have something similar to yours, but on a much, much lower degree : a "voice" that tells me things with an opinion of its own.
Well, the way it manifests for me, is that it is not a voice. More like, I can ask myself questions and my body (more often my head) will react in a binary way. Like just saying yes or no. It is useful for Tarot, which it pushes me to take certain cards or not and make divination fun for me and others around.
It does not know the future. It changes its opinion. It says it does not want to cause me harm and so far it hadn't, but because it changes its opinion I don't believe it 100%. It seems to "prefer" things from others. But it is not me. It seems that it "reacts" faster than me, which brings me to think that it's some sort of intuition or "id" or whatever.
Personally, I live with it through the concept of Daemon, like the one Socrates had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon But it is just a binary one.
Also, funnily, I asked it if it had a name. It said "no". I asked it if it wanted a name. It said "no". So there's that. It reminds me of Venom in the recent movies, minus the "eating people" part.
In countries with women’s and children’s rights, the space of acceptable shamanic behavior is suddenly a lot narrower
Maybe kinda in some circles? I suspect almost none of the tech-worker urban liberals who are the majority on HN would embrace that as a parenting notion. Even among military veterans, your phrasing would likely sound a bit off the mark. They would generally see the call as being about protecting other people and serving their country.
To address your second sentence, most people see a big difference in morality between "Protect the innocent from people who would harm them" and "Harm the innocent".
[1] obviously there will always be outliers here but if we're exclusively considering 21st century America, I feel confident wagering that the amount of religious people who would take Abraham seriously is statistically insignificant, and similar to the amount of nonreligious people who would take him seriously. Also I'm specifically referring to how third parties react to Abraham nearly murdering his son, I don't think it's fair to hold Abraham himself to the same standards as long as we're assuming that he is suffering a mental health crisis.
Yes, it's called Christianity.
What's distinctive about modern Western culture isn't its traditional religions.
Western Christianity was primarily spread through imperialism and colonialism, and thus implemented in such a way that native traditions and cultures were either recontextualized within the Christian paradigm or else purged. The political and financial incentives involved in the spread of Christianity can't be ignored, as they formed the framework by which Western cultures now tend to interrogate and interpret the supernatural.
Within that framework, hallucinations and visions can either mark one as possessed by God (a prophet) or possessed by Satan (a witch.) There's no affordance for a third way ("shamanism") as might exist in other orthodox Christian traditions because that would undermine the authority of the dominant imperialist hierarchy.
Ah, yes, the ever-present institutional forces conspiring to oppress the agency of independent, freedom-loving, free-thinking people. I wonder where the oppression-focused, conspiratorial, paranoid, anti-authoritarian mindset steeped in the language of violence that is so prevalent in the industrialized West, especially among those with mental disorders, comes from....
And theories of mind (and associated disorders) tend to be culturally based and coded - see the syndrome/myth of the wendigo as an example. And it does matter if your culture is colonized and forcibly assimilated into a religious paradigm that explicitly suppresses "shamanic" practices as heretical. The degree of common cultural recognition of shamanism as an esoteric interpretation of hallucinatory experience in any Western culture is roughly in proportion to the degree to which colonizing powers sought to eradicate, and resisted syncretism with, existing native traditions. Because that just wasn't a thing in Christianity in the West at the time.
I don't know what the snark is supposed to be for, and your comment just seems to descend into a bout of logorrhea. It's difficult for me to know what point you're actually trying to make, or what you're trying to prove or disprove. I guess I did a wrongthink and short circuited your capacity for rational thought? Sorry about that.
Oh, right, that's been done.[1] "In 2007, the advertising and marketing campaign for A&E's Paranormal State broke the mold using Audio Spotlight directional sound technology. A seven-story billboard was erected in Lower Manhattan, New York City, visually reminding the public of the channel's popular new programming. A pair of AS-24i focused sound speakers mounted above the billboard projected directional audio onto a targeted area of the sidewalk – all the way from the rooftop."
"The projected sound produced by the Audio Spotlight speakers was a woman's whispering voice that startled and entertained passersby with spooky and suggestive messages such as "Who's that?," "Who's there?," and "It's not your imagination." To those within the narrow coverage area, the sounds seemed as though they were being whispered right next to their heads, while others standing right next to them heard nothing, thanks to the focused sound beam of the Audio Spotlight."
[1] https://www.holosonics.com/applications/creative-marketing
That episode came on in 2012, and it has felt like it took > 10 years to fully recover. It certainly wasn't helpful and to the contrary extremely reinforcing when the whole snowden story broke.
This is a dreadful pit to fall into.
Pretend with me for one moment: You are single, you're looking for love in all the wrong places, mostly on OKCupid. An employee working within the NSA has stumbled upon your information in realtime in a PRISM data slurp, and has taken a personal interest - maybe they think you are weird, and they are not above abuse of their powers - and that they want to exert their "godlike" powers to toy with you - surveil you, pwn your computer, screw with your mind, etc. Keep pretending this is remotely close to reality! What recourse would you have? Would a FOIA request ever validate your claims? Where do you even begin to try to reconcile with this, as a firmly held belief?
.... My voices are illusory, they require a prompt. It can be water running, it is horribly triggered in large crowds. I still have panic attacks in Ikea (but who doesn't?)
.... I got better. It took 10 years of my life to get it back, mostly. It takes a lot out of me to even begin to try to share any of this.
I hope this post helps someone. You too can get through it.
These days I don't have any harmful delusions and only sometimes think I hear someone calling my old name
And I've also been on okcupid for years. Hopefully you are not some alternate personality lol
But early 2022. I started hearing voices too. They all said horrible stuff.
They claimed that people close to me (family & friends) were planning to kill me & steal my crypto.
They also gave me "evidence" that proved my friend was a professional hitman.
Looking at extremely thin, starving Ethiopians on TV they said "Look! You going to look like that, we shall make sure of it, probably worse"
A bus getting a flat tire and people pulling out tools for changing tires was interpreted by the voices as "murder weapons for bludgeoning me to death"
Fortunately, I got in touch with a psychiatrist and he gave me a combination of pills & injections.
It took about 2 years for the voices to completely disappear.
This set me back so badly financially.
Luckily I now feel very normal and confident that I was 100% delusional. I am healthy now & slowly trying to get my life back together. (been off medication for like 1½ years now)
But here is my piece of advice (as a former victim).
If someone is "hearing voices".
Don't try to call them delusional or "bring them back to reality".
What you should do is listen to them & try to provide protection.
- if they feel like they are going to be poisoned by the waiter, cook for them
- if they feel like they are being stalked, offer protection etc
Normal people my claim that this "feeds" into their delusions. But at least it works in the short term to reduce the paranoia.
There is nothing worse than thinking your wife is going to stab you in your sleep and her trying to be around you longer that she usually does. She should send you pictures/video calls of her in another continent.
So as a previous victim here is a recommended approach.
- in the short term (show empathy)
- in the long term seek psychiatric assistance
P.S
Leave your email if your happy to talk. This is a throw away account
Have some limited training in managing these situations.
Listening and avoiding judgement it keeps the person in crisis talking. As the person in crisis continues to talk and experience connection they begin to move out of crisis mode. Once out of crisis mode then work together to find professional help.
But from Googling about the medication (Risperidone).
It looks like I had bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Yes. I am 100% off meds. It has been about 1½ years now.
I don't hear a single "voice in my head".
Those voices are very different from "thinking" or "talking to yourself".
I am glad I haven't heard them in a long time.
Even had the same experience of checking into the mental ward thinking I was going to be killed, and then just wasn't.
Same age as you, too, born in 93
- I received strange phone calls from languages I didn't understand (it was a Belgian number)
- The voices started telling me that my phone was hacked using NSOs Pegasus by a well connected criminal gang.
- they picked stuff that was real. My spam caller, knowledge of spyware corporations.
- they then used that to build stories and paranoia to the point of delusion.
- at the peak of my delusion. They mimicked voices of people I trusted (mum, friends etc).
- they even claimed that NSO was so advanced that they would summon the cenobites (from Hell Raiser) to come & touture me.
I had a friend who developed similar symptoms, and I was very afraid for my own safety when he started sending me paranoid threats.
For example if my care takers wanted to poison me. Why am I still alive? They have fed me for months?
These people trying to kill me. Why haven't they made their move.
I had actually given up on trying to evade my "enemies" and simply waited for them to kill me. But for months they never made thier move. This made me realise that I was delusional.
This is a good insight for anyone who works or deals with folks that aren't fully moored in their reality by their five senses! I've used the buy-in / reduce anxiety approach in a lot of contexts, be it toddlers to dementia to mentally ill family members to addicts to others with unspecified issues.
Correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't think you're suggesting doing this indefinitely, which isn't sustainable IMHO, but in terms of reducing acute episodes.
I've never heard voices or similar, that I'm aware of.
What I struggle to understand, is what makes these voices so compelling or persuasive, for the lack of better words.
I could understand them being highly annoying, in the same way someone is listening to the radio while you're trying to relax or work.
But what is it that makes it hard to brush aside, that drives people to act on them?
It just seems to be more than "just" hearing voices, at least in many cases.
Not trying to be snarky or anything.
Then there is the thing that they can become so strong and draw so much attention to them, that normal life gets to second place. The surreal world with voices is becoming the reality and is taking over. At that point, it can get dangerous, for yourself, and in some cases, others.
Having such a barrage sure does sound stressful and fatiguing, and I can see how that could get under your skin, so to speak.
I try to put myself in others shoes, but it's so difficult with things like this. So while it's far from experiencing it myself, this helps.
- They know your emotional insecurities in & out. So they know exactly how to hit you where it hurts.
- They make you doubt alot.
I said I hadn't heard voices myself, but as I sit here it seems that's not entirely correct. I have an active inner dialog, and that dialog is as if I had said the words myself. Sometimes I actually do say them out loud.
I could imagine that if there's a disconnect such that my inner dialog did not feel like it was me talking to myself, it would perhaps be like hearing a voice that isn't there.
There's a striking similarity in your and mpol's response though, in how these voices play on fear and insecurities in a negative way. It's a theme that seems highly correlated, based on casual observations.
I guess it's possible others have it in the opposite way, but that doesn't manifest in a "problematic" way so we don't hear about it much.
Again, thanks for sharing.
The world in which no one does in fact control anything, starting from the way how one's mind and body works all the way to global and cosmic scale, fails to give any sort of safety or control whatsoever, and instead puts a greater burden of responsibility on the person thinking those thoughts.
It's also much easier to think that you're targeted by someone, because then you automatically become a protagonist of some story, and therefore special by definition. It's much, much simpler and easier than the idea of being a yet-another person with a partial disability due to malfunctioning organs responsible for your internal model of reality.
Humans have a really strong drive for finding meaning where there is none, even if it means dreaming it up.
This succinctly sums up slot machine addiction (RNG is God and the payout schedule is the minister).
"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."
This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.
It's also tough, because I realize that all of us are somewhat responsible for this. The proliferation of technology, advertisement and security marketing has kinda destroyed the concept of being alone. People who suffer unjustly, or who are insecure/anxious about their environment can easily fall down a rabbit hole that never ends. It's the product of indiscriminate profiling and constant dubious marketing of "security" that people become disillusioned and paranoid with tech. The part that really fucks me up is, what if they're just expressing the most rational, conscious human reaction to the information superhellscape we all share? What if we only think the water's fine because we felt it boil slowly?
To me that is every bit as insane as reptilians.
I don't believe in a god in the clouds and I kno evolution exists and the universe is billions of years old and still it must come from or exist somewhere and have something or someone as an origin.
Nothing comes from nothing and nothing happens for no reason - to believe otherwise is a giant leap of faith.
Thus, you should start worshipping me.
But you won't, because you don't actually believe in these small jumps. You want to believe, you try to believe, but you don't. The doubt is there, and it is a healthy doubt (else you would be worshipping me), but it brings you shame.
No, I haven't - you're implying a binary choice where there's no such thing. There's an option to say that I don't know and perhaps I simply don't need to know that in order to have a satisfying life.
The answer "everything just spontaneously appeared" is something I perceive as meaning-seeking, just like "a god created it all". To claim a god of some sort exists is the same as to claim a god doesn't, or reptilians do, or don't - empty claims based on beliefs. To use such beliefs - no matter their shape - in order to create meaning, is just attempting to deal with the idea that meaning is a man-made construct and it doesn't come from higher above.
Therefore wisdom indicates we should all have an open mind when discussing these matters. As we figured out germs and bacteria, I hope we will figure out these issues as well.
The mechanisms are not clear, which is not unusual in medicine, but the treatments are very effective.
It's fucked up for the ill and for their beloved ones in every single case. How much I can appreciate what I believe the article tries to "sell", western societies are not capable of accepting schizophrenia as an enlightenment like Hindus do.
Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, became spiritual guide of a few "tech bros" and other famous personalities. But how he, as a psychology professor from Harvard, described his teacher - Neem Karoli Baba - makes me believe that Ram Dass finally got to understand "the thing" that was elusive for him and Timothy Leary at Harvard, by doing crazy macro doses of psychedelics and listening to an "elightened" person quite loosely attached to our reality.
Based on experiences with such people living in western countries, only the folks who accepted the diagnosis and manage their "traits" with medication are living normal lives. Two people have a pattern of ditching their meds twice a year and not telling anyone (they "feel cured", and it happens almost 6 months apart like on a timer in both cases), which causes a repeated pattern of aggression towards the family, causing physical harm to relatives, being taken by a police by force to a mental health facility). One person never accepted the diagnosis and... it's more on the sad than interesting side what you'd hear from them.
From my experience, people sticking to treatment have completely normal lives.
I'm doing okay now. I make a bunch of money as a software engineer, I get my heart broken by lovers now and then, I have depression and wonder why I'm alive. Not too different from before, not too different from an average person I imagine
It took a few doctor changes for most of them, though, until they found a professional who prescribed some "hitting the spot" treatment and wasn't brainessly testing one drug after another at over-kill doses numbing the ability to think about daily shopping list.
EDIT: one thing I forgot to mention: every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again. On the other hand - there are high levels of alcohol abuse present in all the problematic cases.
>every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again
On the other hand, I threw out my antipsychotics years ago, and I still drink, smoke pot...I've even taken psychedelics now and then (almost lost my head doing so one time, hasn't stopped me since!) I say all of you are just afraid--of course you need some level of rational control, but only enough to drive everyone else mad. Its not my problem, its theirs, and I'm here to make sure they understand it.
>oh, but you're not insane, you're clearly a highly functional person who wasn't supposed to have been given antipsychotics
No, I was and I am an extremely delusional person. I just figured out what to say to keep the world of the sane off my back.
Last I heard he's doing much better after getting psychiatric help.
I'm all for exploring new treatment modalities but IMO this article downplays these symptoms as harmless beliefs when in reality it can get quite dangerous for those closest.
Sorry, but that sounds dangerous. Attributing mental disorders to external evil sources isn't healthy.
When you are absolutely convinced that someone is out to kill you, it's perfectly reasonable to kill them, first.
I have family that suffers from Schizoaffective Disorder, and they have decided that I was out to kill them. It was absolutely clear (to them) that I was "one of them," and I, quite literally, had no communication with them that could even be slightly confused for hostile.
That can be ... uncomfortable.
I used to believe that god was speaking to me about how to love and abide by him through songs by Fiona Apple, Chris Cornell, whatever the hell I was listening to at the time. I would tell the techs in the place I was at to listen to the songs and I tried to convince them it was god, to which they would respond it was not.
There was a period of time where I was non-compliant with my medication because they didn't actually work. I stopped taking them altogether and I went into the deepest psychotic episode I'd ever had till that point. I would listen to things like Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel and get so freaked out I'd run to the bathroom and pray. Mind you, I had been awake for three straight days at the point, while going with 10 hours of sleep a week, at most. I called Crisis one night and told them there were demons outside of my door and if they could not remove them I was going to jump out of my apartment window. It may sound ridiculous but that was the most fearful I've ever been in my entire life, and I've been through awful awful shit.
Lately, as a middle aged person, my hallucinations have become even weirder. Hallucinating white bubbles that fill my entire vision or feeling like my face is made out of jagged alphabet blocks jutting out of my face.
I am not sure why this happens. I've been dealing with mental illness since I was at least 9, which is when I started to hear voices. By 11 I was crying everyday after school. By 12 the mania started to become real and then the hallucinations my freshman year that led to my first suicide attempt at 14. That was the year I got diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder which has morphed into Schizoaffective Disorder.
Brains are wild, wacky, unreliable little mounds of fat and water, no?
I sincerely wish you the very best.
Now let's be clear: someone who hears phantom malicious voices, someone who takes drugs and hallucinates false things, someone whose voices impel them to cause harm: those are pathologies and should be addressed. "Hallucination" carries a negative connotation, a judgement that head-voices are invariably bad, and can't be true, because "empirical science" entirely denies the supernatural and the metaphysical reality of head-voices.
But someone who hears good voices, someone hearing voices who encourage them, or tell them to do the right thing, or calming and comforting voices: that is natural, and that should never be discouraged.
I've experienced the entire gamut of these, and I discovered that my solution is to begin to discern the good ones, to hearken to them, to obey the good voices, and little by little, they overpower the malicious types, and I'm able to withstand onslaughts of not only evil voices, but actual derision and mockery from real people near me. The voices I hear, they've come to me because of what I've heard, who I've listened to, in the past; they're composites, they're archetypes, they're echoes and memories, but they were once based in reality, and uttered by real human beings near me.
Racism and prejudice is real, and the actual tangible hatred I imbibed for decades, in reality and on the Internet, were the genesis of evil and malicious voices in my head. So: medicate all voices away and tranquilize my thoughts? We'd throw out the baby with the bathwater. Why shouldn't I hear good, encouraging voices and obey them?
The mental health system can encourage people to return to rational thought and be grounded in reality. Mentally ill people can learn appropriate behavior, it can be modeled and imitated, and people can be trained, even to discern voices and learn how to ignore or discount the bad ones.
If someone feels stalked, harrassed, targeted by technological means, the most important thing they need is reassurance and respite from that paranoia. They need to be disconnected from the ENVIRONMENTS which foster fear, hatred, and distrust. They need to be extracted from echo chambers that spread F.U.D. because it will rub off on them and drive them to harmful and hateful actions against themselves, or other innocents. Drug 'em if you must, but remember that drugs are band-aids, and it hurts to rip off a band-aid.
But the point is, it's a completely different experience to hallucinate a voice, for me, than to just hear the internal jibber jabber in my head.
I'm not sure that's natural or desirable. It still leads to a situation where you may be following what you consider to be 'good voices' to do things that aren't necessarily in your best interest.
But yes, with therapy and rehabilitation, I trust my brain, and other faculties, more than I used to, and we can indeed employ methods that would falsify those judgements, so that they can be proved good and correct empirically, rather than just feelings or impulses.
The reason I’m sharing this is that I think people tend to believe that people are exclusively either “crazy” or “not crazy” as an ontological property of the person, but as many other anecdotes here show, it really can happen to people randomly. Some are able to get help and recover. Some aren’t.
While I definitely wish there was someone I could have called who could go give him real aid and assistance, I also know that this could have been a terrifying, trust-breaking ordeal and possibly could have even led to violence and imprisonment, or other serious consequences.
People like to talk about “public mental health resources” but unless you’re willing to sic what amounts to police armed with tranquilizers on people who very well may (reasonably?) not wish to be subdued against their will, it’s not really that simple.
Definitely a difficult and fraught subject. I don’t think the answer is to validate psychosis however.
Which is true.
And also -- the article didn't say these experiences were "normal". It fully recognizes that they are experiences are highly unusual, and typically quite distressing to those who experience them.
That's why a more nuanced discussion is needed.
Far from being an old and tired topic (per the shallow dismissal above) -- we're just getting started.
"Oh, it's just SO complex!" is the battle cry of the academic grifter:
we need MUCH more research! I'm writing my grant application right now.
And by the way, that wasn't a "shallow dismissal." I was carefully saying that this isn't a new idea.
And in any case, obviously people don't get treated for the specific behavior (or experience, if you want) of hearing voices. They get treated for the behavior of complaining about voices.
Where does your brain end and you start? Does it make sense to have this distinction?
People aren't treated for covid; they're treated for complaining about their symptoms
They're not treated for anxiety; they're treated for complaining about anxiety.
They're not treated for migraine headaches; they're treated for complaining about headaches.
They're not treated for gout; they're treated for complaining about their big toe.
Anxiety is the only of your examples that's kind of similar, and, likewise, anxiety is highly amenable to cognition-based therapies.
i.e. Actual behaviour is not the expected behaviour. The experience is the trigger of said behaviour (or even lack thereof such as a lack of empathy or sympathy).
I sometimes record music into my mind and let it shuffle, the worst is when I can't hear it.
I had what you could call psychotic episode 3 years ago. It started by hearing faint voices from neighbours apartment (not necesserarily talking about me, but regular everyday stuff.)
I did not realise at the moment it was psychotic episode thing, i thought i just heared background noises. Mind you my current apartment was very well sound proofed but. i shrugged that off easily (voice can travel via air vents and so son).
So after couple of months i went on this electronic music festival in the woods (medium size forest festival in Finland) and in there i started hearing "other people" (whom i/we did not know) talking about me and my current fiance when we were in out tent.
First i thought it was my friends joking, but then realized it is not the case. This is where i got kinda anxious and my SO understood that something is wrong and luckily got me some medication for getting sleep (Clonazepin).
After that i stayed at the tent for the end of the festival (luckily only for one day) and was paranoid that people were talking about me and my fiance and felt very anxious about the whole situation. After couple of days when we arrived back at home it started getting more serious overtone.
Sidenote: I did not do mind altering drugs at the festival. I was there building the festival and its music stages and planned to enjoy festival after the work was done.
So these extra voices continued to haunt me back at home too.
First they were malicious in their intend, trying to spook me first in very very mundane things (did you forget to pay parking ticket etc) and then started to proceed to more deeper things like my life choices / regrets i might have had and so on.
They also told me that there are cameras in next side building filming me (did not really believe this). They also tried to convince me that they are actually gods and that i could too become god if i would kill myself. I laughed to this idea and told them that i am happy being human and would never wanna be god and/or like them.
This whole voice thing affected my possibility to get to sleep, so i could not sleep for 3-4 days in a row and that just worsened the situation, problem was not necessarily the amount of extra voices but sleep deprivation lowered my capacity to handle the criticism, ignore the things voices tol me, put things in more realistic perspective or try to reason with the voices.
So at this point i decided it is time to get some professional help and listed myself in an mental ward for evaluation. I was there for 3 weeks and they started me on some basic antipsychotics and sleeping aids that they usually give for first time psychotic breaks and i managed to get somewhat proper sleep but the voice symptoms did not go away.
After 3 weeks i got out from the hospital (with open ticket to comeback as soon as i feel like it) still hearing the voices in my head, but had medication with me (that really did not help at all, just made me emotionally numb).
During next 1-1.5 years i went through multiple different typical and atypical antipsychotic medications and none of them gave any relief for the hallucinations. At this point the hallucinations started appearing in visual field too.
I have aphantasia so the visual hallucinations appearing when i closed my eyes were very non clear, more like black on black shades. Like i could see shadows morphing to different shapes like humans running through my vision field, human shaped things holding guns, some alien like creatures and so on. Once there even was a boomer for left for dead gameseries and conehead esque figures (that was kinda funny). It was like they were trying to intimidate me believing they were aliens. Oh and i have never seen Conehead movie btw.
Some times eyes open i even saw pretty nicely "rendered" 3d hologram koi fishes floating on my ceiling and other pretty amazing visuazinery. The holograms were made of tiny blue dots and if they pop out from the surface i could push my hand through em and if i tilted my viewpoint the hologram would also tilt (so i could look at the back and/or sides of them).
Weirdly when these eye open visual come to play the voices were very nicely to me and told me that "this is just a play and or playing" and it kinda felt like they were just showing me cool things they can do. It did not feel malicious at the time. More like a show off of a skills.
These voiced entities (which there was multiple at the time, like 10 or so) showed me amazing sights projected on the ceilings and i would chit chat with them about them sometimes in wonder of the imagenary. (at this point me overall reaction to this started to became more mundane than scared because they were not aggressive towards me).
So some days after this event i went to see my parents (whom i have very good relations with) for a week and there stuff turned pretty evil. The sounds started to tell me that i should kill my self to be reborn as god or kill my parents to become a god.
This is of course refused because even i was experiencing psychotic hallucinations i was not psychotic or manic, granted i was sleep deprived but not "crazy" and did not think of doing anything stupid, was just really really tired. This was the second time i went to psychic ward because i really needed some strong medication to get sleep. I was there for 4-5 days and got out feeling better.
What they basicly did whas dig all the dirt (from my mind) from my past life and tried to prosecude me for them and judge me because of them. They also threatened that i am going to hell for these things i have done to what i answered that i don't really believe in a hell in a way traditional christians or other religions believe.
Something good came out from this because during this "mind interrogation" time i succeeded to process lots of my traumas and bad doings from the past and after processing, understanding and integrating them they could not hold those things anymore against me. So, thank entities i think! :D
Oh, these entities changed to other entities once in a while, like new ones came in a play and old ones briefed the new ones about me, current situation, my beliefs and so on. Multiple times they asked each other and me what do i believe (as in religion, after life etc.) and then started acting based on that. I notied multiple times they skipped the briefing and they started doing roles they already had done (like going to hell, we are gods etc). They also had this weird weird fascination of my religious beliefs, like what do i believe now and what do i believe happens after dead. It felt to methat they ment to use these as some sort of base for their acting roles.
They got weird when i explained them that i don't believe in God in traditional sense, maybe as a ultimate creator or something completly different consisting of everything (but lets not deep dive there). When i told them that we humans have this simulation theory that is a possibility they went kinda nuts and some got very angry to me and told me that the theory is idiotic and that i am idiotic.
Then some of the entities said it was actually a good theory and explained it in more datail to another entities whom some of them then actually started to think it as a good way to look universe. But they did not like the idea that there might be another simulation over our simulation and so on. Some entities bluntly said that it was "very fucking worrying idea".
At some point we got over the whole religion and belief thing and the direction of conversations changed. I kinda disarmed them from the usual hell/good/evil/god/angles narrative by telling them that i don't belong to any religion but i believe in my own personal way.
So, this far it has been only "mental" things. Then it started to proceed pseudo-physical.
At some point i started getting pseudo-physical feelings from the entities. Like muscle twitches, ringing in ears (kinda like tinnitus but lasting only like 10-15 seconds a time), static electricity feeling on my hair/sculpt and pushing/pulling/twisting sensation on "ghost limbs, ghost toes, ghost foot".
I would feel that they would twist my big toe or my leg. It did not hurt but i could sense my foot/limb/toe moving. The sensation stopped right when i moved my real phyical body part.
To make it sure for myself that my bodyparts were not moving i was watching my toe when they did it and physical toe did not move but i felt it was moving. Right when i moved my real toe the feeling stopped.
I also felt this "pushing" power sometimes at certain points on my body. I could not figure out what could do this in physics (im a strong believer in physics and laws of nature) i just don't have knowledge of idea howto start trying to measure if there is some force that could do this kind of sensations :)
Regarding the stuff they say. They lie all the time and play roles. I tried this by starting to think some occultic sect kinda thing and almost right away they started roleplaying occultic rituals and stuff related to it to me. Same thing when i started thinkin about alies and (lol) mind control technology from military. So they kinda feed from your thoughs and just go with it.
The one and only thing entities have told me that was true and that i had not known previously was that Finnish as language is related (by a long way) to Sanskrit, but that could just been a joke from them that happened to be true. When entity told me another one got angry and said something like "Now he thinks everything we say to him is not a lie!".
Other than this they have been mostly attacking my inner monologue and inner thoughts trying to get me feel bad about myself (which i am not - im 100% in balance with my self, my life decisions, my life projectory and have integrated my "Jungian shadow" pretty well to my psyche).
From this 3 year period i was also working 1.5 years full time. This things did not really affect my work performance, only thing that happened when i was working that these entities would talk between each others that they don't understand at all what i am doing.
Im by the way going back to workforce probably at the beginning of next month wish me luck ;)
I also do electronic music as a hobby (shameless selfplug: https://soundcloud.com/lappuliisa ) and this they find very interesting. They appreciate music and musicians and are fascinated about someone creating it but they don't seem get free jazz at all.
When i produce music they usually leave me completly alone and let me do my thing. Usually if new entity comes in to the play and noticed that i do music he/she will tell me my music sucks but right after that other entities come and say that "he really does good music and is very talented in that field". So i think i have fan base there :D haha.
I also can't say that they are evil or good. It is almost they lack the idea of evil and good, they are more like instinct driven beings. I mean sure it is evil to say someone "kill yourself" or "kill your parents" but even then it feels like they don't have capability for empathy in same way as we have. They are pretty black and white in their opinions.
So thanks for the rant :) I have stopped taking my antipsychotic medication because they did not help with the symptoms in a long run and actually worsened the way i could face these things and go on my life with them. I have talked about with with my doctors and they agree with me. I have good support net on family side and also on medical side so if it seems that things start to spiral out of control there is multiple catch points to grab me and get me then maybe needed help.
All the best for you and if any of you have any further questions please respond to this thread and or send me email (email is in my profile).
Good Wednesday for everyone from Finland!
As to why they promise to make you a "god". That's an equivalent of promising a pile of money you've "inherited" from a far away uncle if only you transfer them a modest sum to confirm your interest. The reason they want you to do an evil deed is to get you on the hook: so long as you aren't doing wrong things, there is little they can do. Their mindset is very ego-centric, so they understand selfish thoughts, but will be puzzled with things not revolving around your self. This probably explains their attitude towards your music: they don't understand its purpose, and the most they could do is to try flattering. In their world, the only thing worth doing is trying to gain something for themselves at the expense of others by any means possible.
I have tried to ask multiple times different things about their nature and reasoning behind their actions but because they tend to take the role i presume nothing they say can't be taken at a face value.
I have also tried to ask them questions that answers i would not know or questions i would know answer but when they very rarely answer any questions it's only related to the current "play of character" they are doing.
I don't think they have opinion on themselves other than that they are somehow superior than humans as a race or humans are somehow below of them and we are more like a playthings for them.
I have been trying to pick tiny information pieces here and there to make some sort of profile of them but with not so much success.
One weird thing i have noticed that sometimes they use strange synonyms in sentences where the current synonym don't really feel like the right choice of word. Like for example (freely translated from finnish) "to smoke smaller cigarettes" where they ment "to smoke less" cigarettes.
During the "we are gods" phase i heared one of them saying to another one that i know more about religions than them so playing religious games with me is pointless.
My (somewhat wide) knowledge of religions comes from the time when this whole thing started and i started reading lots and lots about different religions, cults, old gods, mythologies and occult literature to see if i could find something that would resemble my situation. And yeah, when i was reading these things they would start to act as these things i was reading :)
Regarding the age situation they once told me that in their view i am just a little boy (im currently 38 years old).
Oh and about making TikToks etc about this is not in my interest. If i start doing streaming or another type of content it will be about how to produce music because that is my hobby and passion :)
Maybe i could use this experience in music somehow but i don't really feel this is something i would like to promote in my music in any way. Sorry.
That pretty much would be the smart thing to take away from a diagnosis yes. The brain is broken (not functioning correctly) if it's presenting them with hallucinations and delusions. Everyone's brain lies to them to some degree. It's usually not a huge problem, but once it becomes one there's no point in denying what's happening. That wouldn't mean that "they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions" but would mean that they should be considered suspect, especially when those thoughts and perceptions are voices in their heads or paranoia.
> But if psychiatry’s broken-brain narrative is pushing people deeper into the TI community, how did this happen?
It isn't pushing people to the TI community. Paranoid schizophrenics don't even need a diagnosis to believe that they're being targeted. It's just what they do. If reality is difficult to accept, it's understandable that a fantasy might look more inviting to them, but the answer is not to lie to patients about the reality of their situation or withhold the truth so that they feel better.
> A chorus of doctors, journalists and activists insisted that seeing mental disorders in terms of defective brain chemistry would alleviate shame and stigma. They gave the lie to the idea that extreme low mood, disabling anxiety or obsessive thoughts might represent a character flaw or a moral defect – or even bad parenting.
I'm not sure what "gave the lie" means here. Having a medical, even physiological, basis for the disorder has made it very clear that it isn't a moral failing or a choice. To that extent, mental illness has been destigmatized pretty well, but ultimately "crazy" is always going to be a bad thing to be, and something nobody wants to be. In that sense there will always be a stigma against it. No one wants to have something wrong with them. I don't think lying to people and telling people there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is something wrong with them is helpful.
The one part of the this article I can really get behind is that drugs aren't always the answer. Drugs can, in some circumstances be ineffective, or even make the situation worse. It can take a very long time to find the right drug or combination or drugs at the right doses to make things better and in the meantime there are real harms that can result from that search. Psychiatric drugs and conditions are not well understood. I do think that it will get better with time though.
I think it's reasonable to be cautious when it comes to treatment with medications, but I think it's also important to be honest and accurate about what the issues are. That means telling people their brains are wrong, and that their experiences aren't real. That psychosis is a very real problem, not a "spiritual emergency" or a "gift" or a "super power" and that it must be dealt with and managed (with or without medication).
First is the idea of "dangerous gifts" and of a mind that is oversensitized to making (perhaps spurious) connections and correlations between otherwise unrelated phenomena - related to the idea of aberrant salience in psychiatry:
One approach saw the mad mind as a wounded mind – not wounded in the sense of broken,
but in the sense of having survived painful life experiences. The experiences we call
‘paranoia’ – being hypervigilant to threats, seeing malicious motives everywhere –
could be a protective response of the organism to real threats, rather than symptoms
of a disease.
A confrontation with the "demons" or "malicious motives" seen everywhere is part of the process of coming to grips with the deluge of noise that increasing the cutoff frequency of your low-pass filters (so to speak) introduces. It's this decreased attenuation of spurious correlations, hypervigilance, indeed "reality itself" that is referred to by psychonauts, shamans, and other mystical seekers in the metaphor of "opening the doors of perception/the soul." Being receptive to such subtle suggestions and inferences from the psyche within given the minutest of perceptual signals from the world without is one such "dangerous gift," and learning to harness it is one of the objectives of the spiritual quest.
Second is the obsolescence of roles once played by medicine men, shamans, faith healers, gurus, and priests in diagnosing such maladies of the mind/soul (which I consider exact synonyms of one another and are perfectly coextensive, metaphysical woo about spirits and energies need not apply) in the rising prominence of psychiatry and other "bottom up" approaches to treating psychological/spiritual (vide supra) conditions through pharmaceutical, chemical interventions that modify the "hardware layer" of the body instead of applying a solution "in software" at the level of mind/psyche/soul. While the mind/body, software/hardware relationship is bidirectional, and physical interventions can indeed result in lasting psychological change, what is de-emphasized in modern psychiatric treatment is the viability of applying solutions at a "software" or psychological level to correct maladies at the physical level. The best examples of such treatments are seen in CBT and various forms of mindfulness, though the latter's dilution and watered down presentation in western discourse is but a shadow of what practitioners of Eastern or mystical traditions will study through Vipassana, fire kasina [0], or even ceremonial magick; it is perhaps the foreignness of such traditions' languages and vocabulary, combined with the difficulty of capturing such slippery subjective experience in prose, that makes these approaches less amenable to western, analytical, quantitative discourse. Further, given that the subject matter of the psyche/soul is, necessarily, subjective, non-quantitative, and more or less opaque to outside inspection from objective observers, the tools of scientific empiricism, objective observation and reproduction, and quantitative methods, are probably ill suited for such phenomena. There are too many variables that comprise the inner phenomenological experience and internal state of one's mind/soul to control for, let alone measure, to faithfully reproduce any kind of experiment that captures, in whole and not in part, the totality of one's psyche at any given time.
A third approach saw, in madness, a spiritual crisis or ‘spiritual emergency’, a term
coined in the 1980s by Stanislav and Christina Grof but with roots in the work of Carl
Jung and Abraham Maslow. In this view, the ‘self’ is a mere drop in a vast sea of
intelligence, consciousness and love. What if what we call insanity is a form of
unmediated contact with this cosmic intelligence? What if experiences of psychosis –
disembodied voices, strange convictions, the sense of being out of one’s body – are
precursors of a powerful spiritual change, one that requires a religious guide, not a
doctor? The documentary film Crazywise (2016) tells the story of Gogo Ekhaya Esima, a
Brooklyn activist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but who rejected her label,
returned to her ancestral roots, and became a Sangoma traditional healer and peer
counsellor.
[0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...
The idea that it's only "stigma" that is the problem is counterproductive. I've heard it a thousand times that "They are no more dangerous than someone without the disease," which is a lie.
We should put more effort into determining underlying causes and definitive therapies rather than massaging away the unpleasant reality.
This is not an uneducated opinion, I work in the field.
> Almost all (94%) of homicides were committed by patients who had a history of alcohol or drug misuse and/or who were not in receipt of planned treatment.
Does that ring true?
I would expect that a bunch of schizophrenics who have never committed a homicide would have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse in their history. People with less severe symptoms and those getting treatment would be less likely to self medicate.
Finding that a bunch of schizophrenics who have committed a homicide have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse isn't surprising either.
Because drug/alcohol use can impair people's judgement/inhibitions in the best of circumstances it could be a factor in attacks by schizophrenics, but considering that there are vast numbers of people with who take drugs to excess and very few of them commit homicide I wouldn't jump to putting all the blame on the booze and weed. I'd think that it has a lot more to do with severe cases self-medicating and the lack of treatment.
It can easily be true that most murderers are alcoholics/addicts and that psychosis makes people more likely to become murderers. There's really no contradiction here unless you think hearing voices is anywhere near as common as people with drinking problems.
This is only true for us WEIRDos, I believe.
There are many cultures where hearing voices doesn't have such negative connotations. Studies have shown that in ie parts of Africa, India, and South America they have much higher neutral and positive experiences than we do.
For this reason I believe the underlying causes are strongly cultural, rather than inherent.
I'd even go as far as suggesting it's an Abrahamic religion thing - if someone is talking to you in your head, it's kinda bad whether it's God or the Devil.
If we're not allowed to use words like "broken" (which I do not concede in general), surely at least we can get people to admit something like "I have a condition that makes my life difficult, and I must take some sort of steps to compensate"?
In my experience, the vast vast majority of mental-illness-acceptance movements are blatantly of the form "it's only natural for my dog to poop anywhere on the lawn, why should I have to pick it up?"
And to follow up this analogy - I don't mandate any particular treatment plan, there are at least 3:
* pick up your dog's poop
* own a dog, but keep it on your own property
* don't own a dog