
In Some Cultures People with Schizophrenia Like the Voices They Hear - Sandman
https://www.braindecoder.com/voice-hearing-experience-in-schizophrenia-may-vary-from-one-culture-to-1381850145.html
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DanBC
This is an interesting article on a potentially interesting (but paywalled
(anyone have a link?) study.

> 20 patients with schizophrenia in San Mateo, California,

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

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

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

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

[https://youtu.be/LNAuckNrC34?t=15m20s](https://youtu.be/LNAuckNrC34?t=15m20s)

~~~
gojomo
Also related:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement)

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

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nabla9
Hearing voices in itself is not a symptom of an illness. Even in our culture
some people cope really well with hearing voices. For example lonely old
people may feel that they have company when they hear voices.

Some facts:

[http://www.intervoiceonline.org/about-voices/essential-
facts](http://www.intervoiceonline.org/about-voices/essential-facts)

~~~
Dylan16807
It depends on how you define illness. Something can have no negative effects
and still be wrong. Compare a missing small toe, perhaps.

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

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

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> Something can have no negative effects and still be wrong.

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

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astazangasta
It's worth noting that recovery outcomes for schizophrenia are dramatically
better in the developing world compared to the developed world, where
schizophrenia is treated like a medical disease and schizophrenics are
horrible pariahs who are made to wander the street and eat trash (at least
this is the case in the US). See
[http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/4...](http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/4/835.short)
e.g., amongst many other studies establishing this trend.

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

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

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

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

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

------
lifeisstillgood
Well, some obvious _probable_ historic figures who may have had more
supportive cultural backgrounds include

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

\- Joan of Arc - who gave surprisingly good military advice

\- presumably every "spirit guide"

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

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

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Interesting I did not know that. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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kaffeemitsahne
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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tiatia
Voices?

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

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

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

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which_indeed

      > In Some Cultures...
    

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

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

Or maybe it's all just link bait.

Maybe.

~~~
kibibu
From the article:

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

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

