We've looked at hearing voices and how there is virtually no way to really tell if they are internal or external and the thin line between "normal" beliefs and those deemed insane.
Hearing voices is one of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and when it crops up in conspiracy/anomaly research the instant reaction of most people is to doubt the person's sanity. However, David Hambling has recently written about how the US government has been working on various non-lethal weapons which included "beam voices into people's heads" (for more, see our earlier look at another article by David). Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, ironic as a recent study shows an awful lot of us are paranoid.
Now a classic account bobs up to the surface again, in an article on miracles:
One of the strangest and most inexplicable of these was reported in the respected British Medical Journal in 1997 and was uncovered by the esteemed consultant psychiatrist Dr Ikechukwu Azuonye. At that time he practiced at Lambeth Hospital, lectured at the University of London, and worked for the research unit of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
The story begins in 1984 when a married woman in her 40s was referred to him apparently suffering from a psychiatric illness. Her ‘symptoms' first appeared when she was at home in London quietly reading a book when a distinct voice appeared in her head.
"Please don't be afraid," the voice said in a firm but soothing tone. "I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you."
She was understandably shocked but was initially able to dismiss the voice. But it refused to go away and claimed that she was physically ill and would soon need help.
The voice realised that he was causing her a lot of distress and tried to reassure her: "To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following- " the voice said.
The voice then gave her three separate mundane pieces of information, which she did not possess at the time. She checked them out, and they proved to be true, but this failed to help because she had already decided that she'd "gone mad." In a state of panic, she went to see her doctor, who immediately referred her to the mental health unit of the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Dr Azuonye came to the conclusion that she was indeed suffering from a mental illness and prescribed a course of anti-psychotic drugs. The voice soon disappeared and she felt able to go on holiday with her husband. Whilst there, the voice returned but this time it was more insistent than ever. And to make matters even worse, it had also brought along a medical colleague from the spirit world.
They told her to return to England immediately as she now needed urgent medical treatment. They then gave her an address to report to. When she arrived, it turned out to be the brain scan department of the Royal Free Hospital.
"The voices then told her to go in and ask to have a brain scan," says Dr Azuonye. "This was apparently for two reasons. She had a tumour in her brain and her brain stem was inflamed. Because the voices had told her things in the past that had turned out to be true, she believed them when they said that she had a tumour.
"So in order to reassure her, I requested a brain scan," he says.
It turned out that the diagnosis made by the voices was indeed correct. Interestingly, says Dr Azuonye, there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone - including the patient - to the tumour.
The surgeon then suggested an immediate operation to remove the tumour, a decision the voices were in agreement with. They did, however, have one caveat says Dr Azuonye.
"They said they would have preferred the operation to be done at Queen's Square Hospital because they specialised in neurological diseases. But as she was already at the Royal Free Hospital they told her to have the procedure done there as it was urgent," he says.
After the operation, and when she'd recovered consciousness, the voices returned one last time to bid her farewell.
"We are pleased to have helped you," they said before bidding her goodbye.
"It is a true miracle," says Dr Azuonye. "The patient regards herself as being helped by a guardian angel."
Remarkable though this story is, it could be dismissed as a one-off were it not for similarly miraculous cases that have come to light since the paper was published in the British Medical Journal. Dr Azuonye was subsequently contacted by numerous other psychiatrists who had treated patients with similarly miraculous experiences. These doctors feared for their careers if they went public with cases that defied all conventional medical explanation.
"Can you imagine what would happen if they told their clinical team that a patient had been possessed by 'demons'?" says Dr Azuonye. "They'd be laughed out of court."
Source (a reprint from a 2006 article)
Hat tip
This appears to suggest similar results to Stanislav Grof's LSD experiments, although, as the same entry makes clear, separating out all the possible answers can't narrow it down - even if some of the other conclusions are equally anomalous. This PDF, entitled Quantum Psychiatry – Where Science Meets Spirit (why must people throw "quantum" into everything these days?) summarises the other alternatives form the main case above:
Dr. Azuonye reports that professional colleagues were divided between those that thought the patient already knew the diagnosis and was making the story up; those who thought the tumour must have produced physical sensations which prompted the patient unconsciously to gather information about the treatment options at certain hospitals; and others who wondered if two well- meaning people, endowed with telepathic gifts, had discovered the tumour and were offering assistance.
To fully rule out a truly otherworldly, external influence the voices would have to impart information unknown and unknownable to any human, something we'd then struggle to test.
What it should do though, is underline the fact that this is an area that requires serious, open-minded investigation, from a number of different angles.
Papers and books
The Guardian have an excellent bibliography on hearing voices and provide us with the reference, from which we found the full text:
Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye (1997) A difficult case: diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices. British Medical Journal. 315. 1685-1686
Interestingly, the BMJ show no citations except for a recent paper which looks very interesting:
Jones, S. R. & Fernyhough, C. (2008) Talking back to the spirits: the voices and visions of Emanuel Swedenborg. History of the Human Sciences. 21. 1-31
Abstract:
The voices and visions experienced by Emanuel Swedenborg remain a topic of much debate. The present article offers a reconsideration of these experiences in relation to changes in psychiatric practice. First, the phenomenology of Swedenborg's experiences is reviewed through an examination of his writings. The varying conceptualizations of these experiences by Swedenborg and his contemporaries, and by psychiatrists of later generations, are examined. We show how attempts by 19th- and 20th-century psychiatrists to explain Swedenborg's condition as the result of either schizophrenia or epilepsy are unable to account for his experiences. We then demonstrate that the re-emergence of the 19th-century concept of `hallucinations in the sane' offers an alternative way to understand Swedenborg's experiences outside typical discourses of mental illness. Finally we argue that Swedenborg's experiences should be understood as exemplifying phenomena which we term `hallucinations without mental disorder', and investigate how conceiving of Swedenborg in this way can inform future research into the experience and clinical significance of hallucinations.
I'll have to try and dig that out.
Another good Guardian resource points me to Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations and a BMJ review which praises it highly:
Their book is an eloquent plea for us to take the experiences of voice hearers seriously and not to devalue them by categorising the content of their experience as meaningless, as the influential phenomenologist Jaspers suggested we should.
Organised into nine chapters and a brief conclusion, the book examines accounts of hearing voices from antiquity to the present day and critically analyses the views of 19th century and contemporary psychiatrists on the experience of hearing voices. The experiences of Socrates, Schreber, and Janet's patient Marcelle are considered in detail, as are contemporary patients with whom the authors have worked. Jaynes's extraordinary theories about the Homeric gods and the nature of consciousness among the heroes of the Iliad receive a detailed exposition and trenchant criticism. Jaynes is in good company. Slater and Roth get a thorough ticking off for failing to refer, in their 1969 textbook Clinical Psychiatry, to the work of members of the object relations school when dismissing psychoanalytic theory as a tool for illuminating psychotic states. A whole chapter is given over to the distorted image of voice hearers portrayed in British broadsheet newspapers in the late 1990s, while the malevolent effect of such portrayals on government attitudes and subsequent legislation is clearly expounded.
The book description is certainly intriguing:
Records of people experiencing verbal hallucinations or hearing voices can be found throughout history. Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity examines almost 2,800 years of these reports including Socrates, Schreber and Pierre Janet's "Marcelle", to provide a clear understanding of the experience and how it may have changed over the millenia. Through six cases of historical and contemporary voice hearers, Leudar and Thomas demonstrate how the experience has metamorphosed from being a sign of virtue to a sign of insanity, signalling such illnesses as schizophrenia or dissociation. They argue that the experience is interpreted by the voice hearer according to social categories conveyed through language, and is therefore best studied as a matter of language use. Controversially, they conclude that 'hearing voices' is an ordinary human experience which is unfortunately either mystified or pathologised.
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Another one on the "to read" list.
Both the book and the Swedenborg paper seem to suggest you don't have to be mad to hear voices or commune with "angels" or "God." As we saw previously, even though Andrea Yates killed her children, the psychiatrists couldn't draw a clear line between what she believed and what her Church taught:
Laney, who was a member of a Pentacostal church, had certain religious beliefs that might not easily be distinguished from some of her psychotic symptoms, Dietz noted. He explained that she was "completely immersed" in the local Pentacostal community, as was her immediate family.
Laney "repeatedly heard God speak to her," Dietz said. "She described this as an internal voice, but her description was similar to what you hear from other fundamentalist Christians who are free of psychotic symptoms."
In addition to believing that God had spoken to her, other "subcultural beliefs" related to her religion "could not be distinguished between her subculture on one hand and mental illness on the other," Dietz commented. These included beliefs that God knew her thoughts and that she was receiving personal guidance from God that she called "urgings or promptings," he said.
"All of those beliefs are consistent with the teachings of her faith and are also consistent with psychosis," he continued.
So the definition of madness is applied to those who follow the voices to destructive ends, like Yates and Peter Sutcliffe, and those like Swedenborg are divinely inspired. However, if hearing voices isn't a sign of madness and they provide information the experiencer doesn't have access to, then where is this coming from?
See also
