Hearing voices? Don’t cry ‘schizophrenia’ just yet

“Hearing voices” is usually something associated with mental disorders like schizophrenia or other severe mental illnesses, but shouldn’t always be. In fact, 5-13 percent of adults will hear voices at one point or another. These instances can occur in times of mental and emotional distress, trauma, bereavement, sensory deprivation or impairment, as well as spiritual experiences.

Scientists think that until now we may have been a little too biased about auditory hallucinations and when they mean mental illness or just a certain mental characteristic. Most research done on the phenomenon of hearing phantom voices is conducted on patients already diagnosed with mental illness. The questions usually begin by determining the loudness, frequency and emotional contents of voices heard.

A research team at Durham and Stanford Universities went back to the basics and asked people what it was like to hear voices. 153 people took the research team’s open-ended questionnaire, including 26 people who had never had a psychiatric diagnosis. After the questionnaire, it still stands that loud voices perceived as coming from outside the head are more serious symptom and disturbance. Interestingly, though, just under half the study participants reported hearing sounds that seemed no difference than hearing a passerby in the room, and a slightly smaller percentage reported hearing thought-like voices, or a mixture of both.

As one participant described it, “I did not hear the voices aurally. They were much more intimate than that, and inescapable. It’s hard to describe how I could ‘hear’ a voice that wasn’t auditory; but the words the voices used and the emotions they contained (hatred and disgust) were completely clear, distinct, and unmistakable, maybe even more so than if I had heard them aurally.”

It seems that in some cases, hearing voices does not necessarily need to be seen as a problem. There was no clear link shown in the study correlating the quality of the voices to any particular mental disorders. Hearing voices could in fact just be the way some people think.