If a person hears more than one voice, they may need to employ different strategies for each of them. Individuals may also benefit from booking specific times to meet with their voices in private, thereby reducing interference with other activities throughout the day. Some of the common ways of coping with hearing voices is through listening to music or audio through headphones, increasing physical activity, changing their location, avoiding substance misuse, resting, taking medications or reciting positive affirmations. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Although the experience of hearing voices can vary by person there are ways to cope.
This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Thank you very much.Ĭopyright © 2015 NPR. Tanya Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford. And what I saw in the difference between Accra and Chennai and the American patients was a different kind of approach to thinking about thought and thinking about mental experience. Thats kind of what these new interventions suggest. You're trying to quiet your anxious inner voices. You're trying to look for positive thoughts, not negative thoughts. I actually think of it as sort of analogous to prayer - that you - when you pray, you are paying attention to your inner experience and you are trying to pay attention to some parts of your mental experience and not others. I think that you can think about this practice as a different way of paying attention to your own thoughts. Is that kind of what you're talking about here?
RATH: For a very long time, there've been individuals advocating incorporating Eastern philosophy into Western psychology, and that goes all the way back to Jung. And as patients experienced their sense that the voice was changing in response to them, their voice hearing diminished. And then he had the patients talk to the voice, and he manipulated what the voice said in return. One of the more fascinating studies was done by this guy Julian Leff who created a computer avatar for a voice. Increasingly, we have research within psychiatry that suggests that when you train people to think about the meaning of their voices and to respond differently to their voices, voice hearing can change for them. LUHRMANN: I think there are reasons to think that that's true.
SCHIZOPHRENIA AND HEARING VOICES HOW TO
RATH: Can you talk about the implications this might have for treatment? Could it be possible for people to learn how to perceive these voices differently? Somehow, this kind of - this sense of private violation is so much more salient to the Americans than it was to people in these two other worlds. Particularly in Chennai, there's this invitation to a much more social world to interpret that auditory experience as if it's another person. I think that there's a much more of a invitation to think about things supernatural, to think about the religious world, to interpret these experiences as the voice of a spirit. I think they're different social invitations in Chennai and Accra. And I think people find that terribly upsetting. And they have this model that when you hear an audible voice, it means that your mind is broken. LUHRMANN: So I think Americans think of their minds as a private fortress. Luhrmann is not a psychologist but a professor of anthropology, so I asked her about the cultural factors that could influence the nature of hallucinations. doesn't necessarily mean that you'll hear scarier voices, but the broader differences across cultures were unmistakable. Luhrmann emphasizes these are findings across populations, not individuals. And in Chennai, people heard annoying relatives who told them to do chores and cleanup. In Ghana, the Africans heard an audible God who told them not to ignore those evil voices. TANYA LUHRMANN: The Americans I spoke to, they felt assaulted by horrible voices that told them that they were worthless and they should die. Tanya Luhrmann went through accounts of schizophrenics in the U.S., in Accra, Ghana and in Chennai, India. But the experience of those voices - what they say and how they say it - might be different across cultures. For people with schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations can be terrifying - voices that come out of nowhere to berate you or tell you to harm yourself.
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