It all began when Marius Romme, a Dutch psychiatrist at the University of Maastricht, saw a patient suffering from acute depression. The patient, Patsy Hage, reported hearing voices. However, she found that reading psychologist Julian Jaynes’ book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind helped her cope with her experiences.
In Origin, Jaynes proposed that around 3,000 years ago, the human mind existed in a non-conscious, bicameral state. This meant that information in the right hemisphere of the brain was transmitted to the left through auditory hallucinations.
Romme advised Hage to discuss the theory with other people dealing with similar hallucinations, and arranged for her to appear on a Dutch television show. About one third of the 450 volunteers who called in to participate claimed they were able to live with their voices without causing distress in their lives. From there, Romme decided to invite 20 members of this group to speak at a conference for voice hearers, and share their knowledge about coping with their experiences.
Such was the beginning of the Hearing Voices Movement, an alternative approach to managing the hearing of voices, or auditory hallucinations, as they are known in psychiatric terminology. The ethos of the movement is to approach these voices as a normal, though unusual variation of personal experience — an acceptable quirk that can be positive or negative depending on the individual, not an experience that needs to be suppressed at all costs. Rather, it suggests in itself, hearing voices is not a sign of mental illness, even though it can often be distressing.
“It is very important to stress that in our view, voices are an aspect of human differentness, rather than a mental health problem,” says Romme. “As with homosexuality, which was also regarded by psychiatry in recent times as an illness, the main issue we have to confront is the denial of the human rights to people who hear voices. And our main task is to change the way society perceives the experience.”
The current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) — known to many as the bible of psychiatry — does, in a sense, affirm these ideas. Auditory hallucinations are not in themselves a disorder, but one of several symptoms that need to co-exist with others in order to prompt a diagnosis of a specific disorder.
When disorders like schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder (all of which can prompt psychotic episodes) are diagnosed, the treatment is often a cocktail of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. These drugs can help improve the patient’s mood, diminish anxiety, and suppress psychotic symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations.
Very often, however, patients don’t respond positively to this treatment. About 25 to 30 per cent of those taking anti-psychotics still hear voices. Furthermore, this class of medications can often have undesirable side effects, like involuntary spasms (known as tardive dyskinesia), insulin insensitivity, sexual dysfunction, and significant weight gain. Some patients report that they become numb, and are unable to function beyond basic activity.
While patients under psychiatric care are often discouraged from talking about the content of their hallucinations, the Hearing Voices Movement argues that voices hold important connections to the hearer’s experiences and emotions. Furthermore, hearers’ claims about the origins or identities of the voices are never questioned.
Brigitte Soucy, a representative of Le Pavois, a voice-hearing network in Québec, emphasises that “the services we offer to voice-hearers are in complementation, not opposition, to psychiatry.” Soucy notes that they are particularly useful to those people whose voices resist any traditional treatment.
“It a service useful for the individual that feels lonely and isolated due to these experiences, that feels powerless facing their voice-hearing, that feels misunderstood by his or her peers, that finds these experiences detrimental to their qualify of life,” states Soucy.
In fact, some research supports the effectiveness of the approach. A study published in 2004 in the British Journal of Psychiatry proposes that the stigma related to voice-hearing, whether experienced in everyday life or psychiatric treatment, makes the voices themselves more anguishing for patients. Another study published in 1994 contends that the effect of voices on patients is related to beliefs about their origin and intent.
According to Le Pavois, members report that they feel empowered, and in control of what they originally considered to be unavoidable symptoms. They learn how to negotiate and challenge their voices, helping to dispel negative feelings and distress.
What the Hearing Voices Movement represents is that resources for psychiatric patients and interested parties is undoubtedly growing. Considering the wealth of experiences found among them, variety can only be a good thing.
