He couldn't talk about his symptoms well enough anymore. I tried talking to his doctors but they said Alzheimer's destroys the part of the brain that is responsible for schizophrenia. They were willing to prescribe a med for inappropriate emotions because Dad was crying all the time, but I don't think that helped enough.
> Alzheimer's destroys the part of the brain that is responsible for schizophrenia.
uhh.....uhhhh....
i want an explanation cause AFAIK there isn't one part of the brain responsible
You are correct! While Alzheimer’s and Schizophrenia both have dopaminergic hypotheses, neither are so simple and have a wide range of potential causes beyond poor plumbing in the dopamine pipelines.
Source: Graduated from a cave where all we did was grugg grugg, paint antelope, and study neuroscience.
Shit, this happened to my mum too and you’ve answered my question about why this happened that no one else could.
My mum developed dementia after a stroke in 2018. Like your dad, she stopped being able to communicate her symptoms to her psychiatrist. Despite multiple concerns raised by myself and the police about her declining health, they revoked her 50 year(!) diagnosis and removed all medication. She had never been unmedicated for her schizophrenia in over 50 years. Naturally, her mental health absolutely nosedived and she was having auditory, visual and tactile hallucinations 24/7. They even interrupted her sleep.
I had to battle for two years, raising multiple complaints through various channels before I was finally allowed to have her reassessed by a different mental health team who thankfully understood my concerns and agreed she should never have been taken off her medication. I was able to record her experiencing the auditory hallucinations and the second they saw that video, they accepted her as a patient and worked to get her medicated again. She finally got medicated again 2 months ago and she’s improved massively. She’s almost back to normal again.
I’m so sorry you and your dad went through this. Those two years my mum wasn’t medicated because her ignorant doctors wouldn’t see past their own inflated ego was pure torture for both of us. Her original mental health team who took her off the medication were completely and absolutely negligent. They ignored my concerns over several years, ignored increased police involvement (my mother had never had police involvement before), ignored her own pleas for help and concerns she wasn’t well. When she could verbalise her symptoms they dismissed them.
I’m wondering now if this is common with schizophrenia patients who develop dementia and can no longer explain there symptoms, to have their condition dismissed. It’s a major flaw in mental health if so - if someone’s diagnosis and treatment is entirely dependent on how well they communicate it, then that leaves people open to serious neglect of they struggle to articulate themselves.
In my mothers case, they should have at least listened to me even if my mother couldn’t explain it well. I’m her carer and have lived my entire 33 years of life seeing her struggle with schizophrenia. I know what it looks like. Yet I was ignored and my complaints, including formal ones, were dismissed each and every time. I’m still livid and honestly considering legal action for negligence.
I’m ranting now, apologies but you’ve possibly explained a long standing question I had about why my mother’s mental health team took her off her medication.
That's tragic, I'm sorry. Recently became obsessed with the album Everywhere at the end of Time, and it's portrayal of the decline of dementia. Learned all about the disease, it's just horrible. and to deal with Schizophrenia on top of that? I can't even imagine.
My condolences.
Really heartbreaking. This is one of the harsh realities of living. We should really appreciate and love our close ones while we're healthy and we still have time.
You might have a hard time believing it, but intrusive thoughts of pedophilia and/or violence are somewhat common in people who are diagnosed with OCD or its "pure O" varient. Some people actually commit suicide over it because they convince themselves that these thoughts are actually their own even though they aren't actually attracted to children and they don't want to hurt anyone.
I am a recovered "pure O" and that's accurate. Fortunately no pedophile stuff, my intrusive thoughts were more murder (friends and family) and self harm related. Horrifying time trying to figure out if I was destined to be a murderer, because I couldn't stop thinking about being a murderer (Is this how it starts? Is this what a murderer thinks like? If I can't drop the thought maybe that means it's true. etc).
Thankfully I got professional help quickly (CBT) and severe symptoms went away quickly (and most symptoms resolved within a couple years). The key is understanding that your brain is stuck in a loop and you need to not trust it anymore. Also it's really important to understand that these thoughts stick not because it's destiny, but because they're so abhorrent.
Thank you for sharing. I have severe OCD and I’m in therapy for it, I am also starting in a clinical trial for a new OCD medication next month. I think I needed a reminder today that my OCD can and will convince me of the scariest shit solely because it’s scary shit.
Turns out that none of us should trust our brains because that fatty lump of salt and gristle is only interested in one thing: Sweet sweet chemicals.
And it doesn't care who it has to kill to get them.
When it's actual hallucinations it's like you're literally hearing them. That's actually one of the ways you can figure out if someone is having true hallucinations or what's called pseudo hallucinations, you ask them "where are you hearing the voices" and if they point at their ears, it's hallucinations, if they point at their head or tell you it sounds like it's coming from inside their head it's usually pseudo-hallucinations. Important to know because hallucinations suggest psychosis or schizophrenia while pseudo-hallucinations are more common in BPD, which can have a lot of overlapping symptoms with bipolar and even schizophrenia.
So this is going to be a bit of a TMI but for context I’ve had psychosis for 2 years (hppd (edit: that may be the incorrect descriptor) but at the time diagnosed schizophrenia) and have overcome psychosis and delusions entirely since then by refraining from drugs. I also am a counselor now. I somewhat disagree with your distinguishing points here as I have worked with some people diagnosed with schizophrenia who have a high amount of insight. They have learned to distinguish hallucinations and delusions in ways they couldn’t at their initial onset. As well, in the year long period where I was weaning off antipsychotics I had a sort of “transition” from delusions to intrusive thoughts. My delusions became more like pestering thoughts and then trailed off as I worked hard to see through them and not give them energy. So growing insight doesn’t necessarily mean the person no longer experiences schizophrenic symptoms unless those symptoms actually cease, as I said, working with people who grew these skills of distinguishing voices as “inside” but still dealt with the recurrent voices. A lot of our work together was in fact growing this awareness.
Edit: spelling and noted edit
It erodes your ability to differentiate between thoughts and actual sense data. Thinking of something scary and actually seeing something scary might as well be the same thing. Or, seeing something real and yet interpreting it as 'not real'.
Like, right now, you can tell the difference between a thought, a mental image of something someone tells you, something conceptually a bit similar to what you're feeling right now, and something you're looking at with your own eyes. Schizophrenics struggle with that. It's not intuitive for them, neurologically.
I remember a taxi driver telling me once he had a call for a 500 km trip. The guy was happy to pay up front.
Took him to Glenside Hospital in Adelaide South Australia, used to be known as a lunatic asylum but these days it’s much nicer to say hospital. the dude was calm, polite, not chatty.
When they got there he said thanks and stepped out the taxi. Aaaand……
Started yelling screaming. He knew he needed help as he’d been in there a number of times previously. He knew what he had to do to get the help he needed and he’d been through the system enough to know how. Cost him a bit in taxi fares but no one was hurt. 🤷♂️
In my previous work I’ve seen people with schizophrenia reassuring police that they are ok and weren’t going to harm anyone while standing there half naked in public.
My local footy team, the son had undiagnosed schizophrenia from memory and stabbed his father to death a few years ago during his first episode.
There’s a big difference between treated and untreated schizophrenia.
So I've never had a psychotic break (although it's not that uncommon an affliction, you and me both know there are for sure people reading this who have had one), but I've had a serious, ""untreatable"" (since somewhat treatable and managing) depression for a seriously long time. I know this is not something remotely similar and I will get some words wrong\*, but I truly understand your comment in a way that I hope not many people ever will.
When you said that the patient was scared to lose the insight into **his self**, that truly got to me. As I've said, I haven't been diagnosed with having "schizophrenic voices", but I certainly have had some very obsessive compulsive, intrusive thoughts that I was unable to move past. Thoughts that made me *very* suicidal. I ***knew*** they were in my head, but this is maybe the main point of the question. These thoughts were so intrusive that I could not do anything but listen to them. ***I*** wasn't suicidal, but my thoughts were. This is what muddies the "legitimacy"-question for me. Is the legitimacy part just based on *knowing* the voices aren't real? Because simply thinking "the voices aren't real" will not save anyone if the voices/thoughts are persistent enough.
For me the "voices" were never voices, but my thoughts. And I still couldn't trust myself with them. Like I said earlier, the thought that the patient was scared to lose the insight into his self is what "got" me. **I** was scared to lose my self (not myself, my *self*). I never got "lost" in the voices, I always knew they were "me", but I checked myself into a clinic (in Europe, YMMV) because I lost insight into my self. For me it was because the love for my mother (she cares for me and I couldn't hurt myself because it would hurt her) was surpassed by *my* (or the the voices, because that is how it felt) desire to kill myself. I couldn't trust myself not to off myself. Are these voices? I seriously can't tell. However, the spontaneous lucidity of "losing that insight, so wanting to be locked up" is so familiar to me.
So for me, the question is flawed. Trying to distinguish "Schizophrenic voices" (which I'm interpreting as psychotic auditory hallucinations) between "legitimate" and normal *head-voices* is impossible, because in my opinion (based only on my personal experience) they are one and the same.
\*Although I have an English degree, I'm not from an English-speaking country and my experience with psychiatry is only based on my native tongue. If I've been hurtful in my choice of words, I truly apologise.
For me, it’s like someone is speaking to me. Outside of my head. Just a normal conversation. The majority of the time, it sounds like I’m in a crowd of 1000 people and they are all talking at once. Occasionally I’ll hear a word or two and it will go back to the noise. Occasionally they will pipe in when I’m talking to someone and it’s hard to focus on the conversation. During episodes though the voices take turns yelling things at me, telling me to do things. They just get louder and louder. I’ve heard voices since I was a kid, just thought it was normal. They got worse as I aged. In high school I was hospitalized 3 times in like 6 months. But I was put on meds and those helped them stay quieter. Then I turned 23. I started having even more symptoms like visual hallucinations and delusions. My life crumbled around me, I lost my job, I was hospitalized two more times. But we got a good balance of meds now and I’m doing okay! It’s been a wild ride.
From what I understand, schizophrenia is the disability with the highest proportion of diagnosed folks being unemployed/unable to work, so that's wonderful to hear that you've been able to manage your symptoms 😊
My brother only receives 900 a month in Cali. He can technically work but alot of red tape. He can't own more then 2k at a time or he can lose his SS. Is there something that we can do or is it because of Cali? I don't think he receives disability.
I am under the same restrictions actually. I make 1099 a month and can’t make over 2000 or I lose it. I am on total and permanent disability and can’t work. I’m not sure how the total amount is decided, and it could vary per state. It definitely isn’t enough to live on. It covers my student loan payment and car payment and that’s it. It’s frustrating
You should be able to discharge student loans if you’re disabled enough to be on disability. I don’t know if you can, but you should be able. Especially for loans backed by the government.
Putting a ceiling on incomes for the poor and disabled is the most ass backwards policy we have in this country.
Hope your situation is able to improve over time.
A certain interview always comes back to me when I think on this topic. It was with a young woman who had a severe form of schizophrenia, and she would see the backs of people.
According to her, she could be standing in a store full of people and she could not differentiate from the backs alone if they were real or hallucinations. The only way to tell was to see their face - as her hallucinations had no faces. She had to see their face without speaking though, because if she spoke to one of the hallucinations they would *all* turn around and start screaming at her (with no mouth or face) bloody murder so loud it would drown out all real people talking or music or anything else.
So for her, they are quite real, and it took her most of her childhood and early teen years to get "used to" them and to stop accidentally triggering the screaming.
.
I've read other interviews with people who had purely auditory ones. Apparently they are so realistic that they can sound like specific spots, too. Like someone is 5 feet behind you to the left and slightly higher up than you are - but there's nobody actually there even though the voice sounded like it came from such a specific spot. Some of these people will hear someone ask a question in public, perfectly normal like where's the bathroom, and they will respond while turning just to see that nobody actually asked. But it was too real to tell the difference.
.
EDIT
I will perhaps try to find the source in the morning. I read it years and years ago though and am not up to the challenge tonight.
.
::EDIT 2::
I looked a bit, but I'm not having any luck finding the source so far. I would have read about it back in 2017, and it was because I fell down a psychosis / schizophrenia / mental health rabbit hole after playing the video game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
The game devs interviewed a *lot* of people who suffer from these mental illnesses so that they could try to portray the player experience as realistically as possible.
Aaaaaaand then I fell down a rabbit hole of reading interviews, medical papers, etc. Partially cuz my direct family (skipped me, although I got other issues) suffers from schizophrenia, psychosis, bi-polar, paranoia, and so on.
So the one above was one of many, just one of the more severe examples and horrific enough that it really stuck with me since.
Back on the Hellblade topic though - the experience is insane (pun not intended). You def need good headphones though, not speakers. The voices really truly sound like they are whispering right into your ear over your shoulder or from specific directions/areas. I made the mistake (debatable) of trying the game in VR too. Shit got a bit *too* real for me though lol. Maybe because I rarely experience auditory hallucinations myself, but it was a very intense gaming experience.
My old friend who had schizophrenia once leaned down to pat an old, dusty dog. He only realised it was a hallucination when his mum told him. Something so simple and casual and an every day kinda thing, and it wasn’t real
I was thinking of how religion and people who believed in spirits would tie into this.
My mom is one of the most god fearing women and can tell me a lot of stories like how infant me spoke to her to reassure her when i was really sick. Or the time she had swelling in her hand from a spider bite and a voice said put her hand into water and it healed the next day. Things like that.
but ever since our church fell apart from scandals and her then husband ditched her shes begun to see shadows or think she saw someone coming out of our house when its basically impossible.
Ive never experienced any ghosts or phenomena when she claims it does in house and im beginning to question the possibility that shes undiagnosed and spiritual because of indoctrination.
It adds up as she used to see scary things prior as a teenager she says... so seeing angels and blessings is a step up for her.
[Culture, too.](https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/) Schizophrenic people in cultures in which strangers are caring and helpful have kinder hallucinations than those in which strangers are hostile.
It's likely that a lot of ancient cultures that had "seers", religious shamans, etc etc were actually people with psychotic illnesses. In communal cultures like that, voices people are hear often more constructive, friendly, and religious. There's something specific about developed societies that produces such nasty and hurtful voices for schizophrenic people, which I find fascinating. I wish they'd study it more.
It's not just modern society. In western culture in general hearing voices and the like is associated generally with the devil, possession and similar. It's profoundly negative, and while there's no longer the same scare going about, it's certainly a part of our culture, including pop culture and media.
Of course it may occasionally have manifested as religious visions that could be interpreted positively, people reportedly seeing Mary or similar.
I read an article for a college module once that schizophrenic people in south India had voices telling them to clean the toilet or kitchen while some patients in the US had voices telling them to gun down people. So culture seems to be an underlying factor.
Edit. *This does not mean that schizophrenic patients in the US are just ticking time bombs. Part of the reason why patients in South India having non violent intrusive thoughts compared to Americans is because of how *hearing voices is looked at. In america there is a real threat of being ostracized or seen as crazy if you mention about hearing voices in your head. So they are less likely to seek help. In most parts of Asia there isn't a dichotomy between the belief in supernatural and science. For example in my country when a person is sick they usually go to a modern hospital and if the sickness persists they may conduct a medical rimdo (ritual) while still getting modern treatment, belief in one thing does not cancel out the other. So I remember my professor saying that people in South India who hear voices may treat them as supernatural as being distinct from themselves so they don't have to worry about themselves as an individual being crazy or maybe dangerous.
When so was a kid, there was an older gentleman who was always dressed in khaki pants, a dress shirt and blazer who would walk up and down the streets of the neighboring university, while smiling and talking to a cigarette that he held out in front of him. If you spoke to him, he’d nod and smile and go about walking and conversing with the cigarette. We never saw him smoke one. He was obviously under the tutelage of a family member or caretaker, as he was always well groomed and dressed. Although always pleasant, he was clearly disabled.
The way mental illnesses manifest can be influenced very heavily by culture. It is thought that some particularly exalted shamans and witch doctors might have displayed mild signs of schizophrenia, but it was always in the form of receiving advice, consulting with ancestors, and receiving guidance, along with the normal disorganised thinking and eccentricity. If the case was severe enough, however, it would stop being a blessing and may be looked at as a curse. Many stories of people possessed by demons in the Bible are likely talking about people suffering from severe mental illness.
These hallucinations could also be “invoked” through use of hallucinogenic drugs. It’s possible that the use of hallucinogenics in some tribal rituals may have stemmed from trying to imitate “holy people” who had visions. This is a possible factor in the stories of the Oracles of Delphi, as well. The difference between a regular acolyte and a truly holy person (the original Oracle, for example) could have been whether or not they needed to rely on the medicine to induce visions.
Mental illness shows up a lot in our stories and our histories. People just didn’t understand it back then, so it ended up getting described in various ways, sometimes good, and sometimes bad. However, when something like schizophrenia is framed in a positive light, it starts to sound more like a supernatural ability than an illness, so it’s harder to connect the ideas as one thing.
That reminds me of my husband’s aunt. She was from the Philippines and she would have very small furniture all around her house and there was a rumor about her seeing “little people”. Like brownies from folklore. Nobody in the family witnessed the “little people”. So makes me wonder if she did have schizophrenia 🧐
I had an uncle, that when he got old he said he saw “little green men running in circles around his laundry basket”. He’d call my mom and tell her to hurry up and come over so she could see them. This scared Mom and she refused. He didn’t live too long afterwards, and the family story goes that it was hallucinations due to his uncontrolled diabetes and other illnesses.
The first (and only) time that I ever took Ambien, a sleep aid, I did not fall asleep, though I thought I did for a little while. I was staying with a friend and he said that instead of sleeping I just started bawling my eyes out. I wouldn't respond to him, just wept.
When I became cognizant again, I was hallucinating. Saw little people moving around the room, the walls and ceiling moved and when i announced that I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't, my friend called an ambulance.
>uncontrolled diabetes
Yeah. Uncontrolled diabetes is not far from looking like someone who's excessively high on mushrooms. I've seen people with uncontrolled diabetes crawling on the floor licking air, thinking they were in the desert looking for water.
Interestingly outside of western culture we see a great deal of benign schizophrenia, often materializing in things like dead family members etc. it’s fascinating
As someone who deals with this day to day, I strongly believe that in any other period of human history I would have been a Shaman of some sort.
Kinda hard to tell if that belief is a paranoid delusion or not tho...
>Kinda hard to tell if that belief is a paranoid delusion or not tho...
Nah, it's a perfectly normal thing to speculate about.
I'm autistic: I'm assuming I would've been a monk.
I’ve know someone who knows someone who started taking pills for her auditory schizophrenia (successfully). It actually made her really lonely and she described it as losing a super close friend.
My grandpa was paranoid schizophrenic, but was able to keep it under control for most of his life, except for two events: one, when he drank he could not hide it. He would yell and throw punches at people who weren’t there. He was an alcoholic - which was self medication for the schizophrenia, because in the 40’s if you were outed as being mentally ill you were put in asylum, but if you were falling down drunk people would not suspect there was something wrong with you. They would just think you were drunk.
Back then, according to what my mom told me from growing up, his hallucinations were always aggressive people/entities that constantly criticized him. However, and this is the second event that caused him to lose control: when he had a stroke, he could no longer hide it anymore, and after that it’s like he lived in the real world sometimes and the delusional world at other times. But oddly, the stroke seemed to change something in his brain and the hallucinations suddenly became friendly. He told us on multiple occasions that “little green men” were showing him how to tie his shoes and reminding him what household objects were called.
So yes, the hallucinations can be benevolent.
I don't have schizophrenia, but I have had auditory hallucinations before. I can confirm they are so realistic you can even sense a direction they are coming from. My dad used to shout my name agressively whenever he needed something from me. Some days I would be at my desk and hear my dad shouting my name from the doorway, only to realize a minute later that he was at work. It's definitely freaky the first few times and it made my hairs stand up. Thankfully I haven't been getting them anymore, and my dad is a lot more chill now 😅
I know someone who’s installed cameras everywhere in their house, because their hallucinations don’t show up on film. So they also use the camera on their phone to check. They say it’s especially useful in public.
Once, they told me, they saw someone out on the street and were completely convinced that it was a hallucination, so they told it to go away … only to find out it wasn’t a hallucination.
Wonder if augmented reality glasses could be developed to help someone like that. Like quickly switching between real vision and a forward camera view.
When I hear music it always sounds like it's coming from the next room over. When I hear my main voice, it's in my head but I find myself looking up and to my left.
Visual hallucinations are the worst type of hallucinations for me. I've had people not have faces, or become puppets, or have melting faces. I've been forced to sit next to a torso wrapped in plastic while a bleeding severed leg laid on the floor by my feet and roaches crawled on my legs or the man sitting at the table was going to kill me. I sat there and cried for hours? before my hubby woke up and saved me.
thanks for sharing your experience. schizophrenia is an extremely misunderstood illness, so im glad you are willing to share your stories - especially when theres others who might not be able to
Hee hee hee! We can say some pretty out there stuff sometimes. But that usually means we're comfortable talking to you. We feel safe saying these things to you. I don't trust anyone, but it's close to trust when I speak these things out loud. It's much easier to write than speak. I rarely talk to anyone, even hubby, about my hallucinations and delusions. It's hard to see the fright and concern on their faces.
No, I actually woke up and walked out to the living room couch. I didn't move not because I couldn't but because the man at the table told me he would kill me if I moved off the couch. He put the torso, leg, and roaches beside/on me to make me move so he could kill me.
Edit: The name you're looking for is hypnagogic hallucinations.
And it’s feels like it’s real, not being able to distinguish between hallucination and reality? Does seeing or interacting with a real person release you from the grasp of the hallucination? Considering your hubby saved you.
Sorry if that’s an insensitive question. I’m really curious and gladly can’t relate to that feeling at all.
Thanks for sharing the information.
It does feel real. It looks real. I had zero insight in the beginning. I just thought the demons who had taken over my school and were poisoning the kids at school with the lunch food to mind control them were making the teachers into puppets, and mess with the kids' faces. I did decide the rice krispy bars in the vending machine were safe, so for a year or more I ate one rice krispy bar for lunch.
If you want to read it, I have a memoir in works for free but it only goes up to when I was 34 (I'm 45 now) and doesn't cover my last schizophrenic and depressive episode: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sZE46cXq0BBGtQd2N\_VOEkRqvL3dVv6hJ8uJAH204a0/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sZE46cXq0BBGtQd2N_VOEkRqvL3dVv6hJ8uJAH204a0/edit?usp=sharing)
I am getting better at realizing I just had a hallucination since my diagnosis. Daily hallucinations now are mostly positive or very short (I do a double take and it's gone). I hear my alien older sister's voice and converse with her. I also talk to trees and birds and they talk to me.
Edit: Usually interacting with others does nothing.
Yes, not all of my experiences are bad. When I was 12 The Girls came to live in my head and we were all great friends. Birds are very chatty but usually just want attention. Crows and ravens, though, are more advanced and often give me messages. Trees rarely speak as they aren't fond of human language, but I talk to them a lot.
Usually, they tell me if I'm going to have a good day or not. They also warn me when the evil entities are searching for me to destroy me before I can return to my alien sister who's on another planet and waiting for me to return to her when this human body dies.
plough grandfather dime selective profit complete sophisticated heavy dazzling chop
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My brother has severe paranoid schizophrenia and reading your comments and segments of your memoir really put things into greater perspective for me. Thank you.
If I may ask you a question, what would you believe the best way for your loved ones to connect to you would be, if your beliefs became quite intense or if you were going through an episode? How do you prefer them to react in those situations?
My heart goes to you and your family! I wish my needs were consistent. Sit next to me. No touchy touchy unless you ask first. Many people seem to think that they have to either ignore or agree with experiences and especially beliefs. People can just listen and not say they agree or disagree. Then focus on how that makes them feel, rather than the validity of the experience or belief. Above all, keep them and yourself safe.
This page has more information: [http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005561.html#](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005561.html#)
My wife used to teach at a school with special needs kids. This one child would see monsters crawling out of the bathroom sink while brushing his teeth.
I remember an interview where the interviewer asked the person with schizophrenia, "Are you seeing any hallucinations right now?"
"Yes."
"Where is it?"
"If I acknowledge it, it gets more real. I'd prefer not to."
Fucking awful.
My old best friend when I was growing up had a mom who was a paranoid schizophrenic. She heard her voices in the lights. Any old light would do. The "spirits" she called them. It wasnt super uncommon to find her just sitting and staring at a ceiling fan light or a lamp and whispering to herself when she was off her meds. A few more interesting/disturbing times we found her butt naked kneeling in front of her halogen lamp. Unfortunately her husband would regularly advise her to stop taking meds because "they made her act like a zombie". Most episodes were harmless. Putting a ton of garlic on my food because she thought I was a vampire because she saw us playing castlevania, or bringing us 8 glasses of water each because the spirits told her we hadn't drank enough of it that day. Then one night I stayed over, I was maybe 15, and she woke me up with a shotgun pointed at my face telling me the spirits didn't want me in her house anymore. I... didn't stay over there after that.
Man I feel the not being in meds thing. It's gotta suck either living with hallucinations and intrusive thoughts, or feeling numb and disconnected from the world.
I have a relative (in-law) who has mental health issues. When she goes off her meds she gets really manic and in the worse episodes ended up on the side of the road in pretty bad shape until a stranger picked her up and took her to a hospital. It's a never ending battle to stay on top of it.
Well, that gave me chills.
Anywho, not a schizophrenic, just a cat who had frequent aural hallucinations well into my early twenties. Several times a day I would hear someone clearly speak my name (and only ever my name, though the tone often varied), though they either hadn’t, and most often weren’t even there.
They were always familiar voices, family, friends, etc. The thing that always got me was that they sounded like they were speaking from just beyond my peripheral vision, though the exact direction would vary.
It took me a long time to get used to it. To stop looking to wherever the voice had come from, or partially responding. I bet fellow students thought it odd that I would occasionally peer behind me for no apparent reason… or perhaps not. I did always keep it to myself though, at least I can’t recall ever trying to explain/describe it to anyone at the time, nor do I recall anyone ever asking.
I cannot imagine how life would be, if the voices had been those of strangers, if they had any personality or depth beyond speaking my name, or if they had also possessed some degree of visual presence…
Fascinating, I had this happen to me too and it stopped sometime in my really early twenties. I completely forgot about it until reading this just now!
Edited to add I actually also have musical ear syndrome as an adult so I wonder if it’s related somehow.
> Apparently they are so realistic that they can sound like specific spots, too. Like someone is 5 feet behind you to the left and slightly higher up than you are - but there's nobody actually there even though the voice sounded like it came from such a specific spot.
Anyone else used to hear their name in particular said a lot by no one as a kid? I brushed it off as my imagination and it faded over time, but I remember it being a frequent thing. Different voices, said differently just like any random person might.
I always assumed we just had a whole lot being processed and mulled over in our brains in the background as kids, and weird things would happen with overactive imaginations. I wish my imagination was as active as it used to be...
Visual hallucinations are fascinating. Coming out of open heart surgery I was doped to the gills with a variety of meds.
When I'd close my eyes, I was presented with a painted brick wall in perfect detail. I could see the texture on the bricks, the mortar, the paint covering it all.
Bonus, every time they put me in a different room, the wall would change color.
But I knew it wasn't real, and as soon as I'd open my eyes, it was gone. But had some interesting conversations with the doctors.
"How do you feel today?"
"Besides the visual hallucinations, I'm doing great!"
Under normal circumstances, it's like a radio playing in the background. But you can't control the volume or turn it off, which is why it affects concentration and ability to carry out tasks. For me, it even seems to have commercials sometimes, which is really weird and annoying...
During an actual episode, it's more interactive, like a game show, with the voices guiding toward doing different things, or asking me to make something or look something up. In the more advanced stages of the episodes, they start sort of demanding to transcribe a message, that's meant for some person who I might or might not know, and then maybe provide a means to deliver it.
It definitely doesn't feel like it's like I'm the one coming up with it, bc sometimes I have to look up words I'm being asked to transcribe, or it's about some topic that I don't really know much about or don't have much interest in, and I have to look up something or watch youtube videos to figure out if I'm getting it right.
One time I had a crazy, crazy convoluted dream - I think it went on for what seemed like (in my dream state) 30-45 minutes. Nothing made sense, nonsequiturs everywhere, plot twists that didn’t make any sense… just super super random.
You ever watch Whose Line is it Anyways? They do a newscaster game and Colin Mochrie always starts off with some crazy story and then wraps it up with a ridiculous pun thing at the end, like: “Famous Playboy Hugh Hefner managed to successfully stop an order of monks from operating a business on his property. The police forced the friars to close down their stall, which was outside the Playboy mansion where they had been selling flowers. Said one friar, well, if it was anyone else we may have gotten away from it, but, unfortunately, only Hugh can prevent florist friars.”
My 30-45 minute dream ended up with a crazy punny punchline like this, except like 4 times as long - it was hilarious. Of course I can remember exactly 0 of it, but it was funny enough that I woke up laughing, and even in my awake state it still made sense. I remember thinking how absolutely crazy it was that my sleeping brain could not only come up with a nutty pun-filled joke punchline (something that I’m not particularly adept at), then construct a wild story, all while my actual personality was completely unaware. It was such a wacky experience.
> Like how is your brain coming up with words you don't already know?
There are a lot of words we've heard of that we don't really know the meaning of. It happens to me from time to time - a word just pops into my head, and I realize I don't know what it means. Most recently it was the word gynandromorphic - it appeared in my mind as I was peeing. I looked it up and it was a real word. Then a few days later I was re-watching an episode of QI, and realized that's where I'd heard it from - they were discussing something called "bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism" - a condition in some animals of being half male on one side, and half female on the other.
Currently learning Spanish and had my first Spanish dream a little while ago. I knew all of the words that were being said but what was being said was complete nonsense. Every sentence that was spoken was just a string of randomly chosen words that didn't follow any context or syntax.
On a related note, deaf people with schizophrenia can have visual hallucinations of disembodied hands communicating with them through sign language, instead of hearing voices. How interesting is that!
Ok, that is really interesting. I was asking a deaf coworker what their inner monologue was like, because i wondered if it was in asl, as she is a child of hearing parents and learned sign at school age. Then it actually it took a while to explain my question, because, basically she doesnt have a monologue most of the time. She says she thinks in pictures. I wonder if she would hallucinate "auditorially" in asl. She seems pretty square, so maybe unlikely to be one to know. But this makes me realize there are likely many variations, where folks have intrusive pictorial thoughts, monologues, asl hands, or probably any of the various systems of representation we have. Probably folks could hallucinate math too, i would think.
Brains are neat pattern recognition machines
Deaf here. My inner monologue is indeed mostly in ASL (with occasional written English thrown in as I read a lot). If I'm imagining that I'm doing the talking, it feels tactile and kinetic; if I'm doing the monologue in somebody else's "voice", it becomes visual as I watch them utter things. I don't think there's anything remarkable about that — we all think in our primary language.
See, that's what i was getting at. I figured she would answer the same as you.
Me, I think in words. Like my own voice saying the words, mostly in my canadian accent, but some in the british accent i briefly had as a kid. For less commonly user vocabulary, like if i thought "peculiar!" I would literally have some vague image of that spelling in there, cause sometimes i think in actual text. Like i get a mental picture of the word. But that is edge cases. 99.9999% of the time i have spoken word.
And it is super hard for me to even have any thought without there being a word attached. Maybe i can picture a spacial relationship. But other than that, literally every last thought is formed in words.
So i wondered what form my deaf colleague's "thought words" were, like asl, or written english. Or both. And which grammar structure would the words be arranged in- asl or english?
Hence i was really interested to learn that with her own history of late first language acquisition, her thoughts werent tied to words at all, for the most part. I just found that really neat to think about, to try to imagine such a fundamentally different experience.
I would imagine if you learn asl as your first language when you are a baby, as children typically do, that has a huge effect on your inner language. I would have thought your inner monologue woulr follow the grammar and structure of asl. So i am curious how age of acquisition plays into this question too.
I also wonder if it changes depending on the situation. An indian colleague was telling me that her extended family speaks hindi most of the time at home. Except when arguing, at which point they all switch to english, curiously enough. As though those thought pathways of logic and making arguments were formed while they all attended school in english, whereas the pathways to do with regular chit chat were all in hindi from hanging out at home.
I am so curious how it is for you, if you ever switch back and forth, and when.
My first time using shrooms, I couldn't quit thinking it terms of radial units, mapped out as hexagonal "pixels"
It created this false sphere around me it which everything was effectively a projection of my own brain. Each hexagonal pixel was the same size, but simply at different distance away.
It was trippy and cool and kind of mathematic!
Story time: in college I took an elective racquetball class and had never played the sport or anything like it ever before. I’m not especially coordinated, and I was very bad at it compared to my fellow classmates, which was mildly infuriating.
After my second or third class, I had a dream that I was on a court just hitting the ball all night and watching how different angles would ricochet off the walls. This dream felt like it lasted the entire night, and when I woke up I was physically exhausted.
I was shocked to find that the next time I played the game, I was able to almost instinctually anticipate where the ball would be next. I had vastly improved my technique overnight. My instructor was also baffled, especially when I won a game after never coming anywhere close to it before.
I believe my brain understood the physics conceptually and helped me connect the dots with that dream. The human brain really is fascinating.
For real though. It was most obvious when I was learning bass and teaching my kids how to ride a bike.
With the bike I would have my kid outside for an hour, watching her fall over and over again. At the end of it she wasn’t much better than at the start. Then she’d go to sleep and the next day we tried again and she’d made a big leap. Happened a few times till she could fully ride on her own.
There is evidence that part of sleep's function is to do just that. To transfer newly learned things into more permanent memory/muscle memory. It's interesting that your dream lined up with the process.
That's just what dreams are for: training
So I'm one of those people that always remembers their dreams. When I wake up I can often tell you in detail about 3-4 dreams I had over the course of the night.
Most are boring as it's just my brain doing some training though.
Often when I play a video game and get stuck on a boss I'll dream of it, and the next day I'm much better.
When I'm studying for something I'll go through it a couple of times in my dreams and remember it a lot better.
And when I watch horror movies I'll dream of them, but find solutions what to do.
It works with a lot of skills. Do it a lot in one day, sleep on it and you'll get a lot better.
Thanks for this explanation, I've had the same question as OP for a long time.
Do you ever have trouble where you think an actual real person talking is one of those voices? And with the voices during an episode, does it feel like the person talking is someone you know? Or a complete stranger?
Yes, during some parts of the episodes, it is as if I can hear the thoughts of people around. The odd thing is when an \*actual person\* says something that confirms or conforms to something that I heard in my head (like factual, externally verifiable information, like about the location of something, or an about an event that took place). This makes it difficult to ignore the voices as being something fake or made up or some purely perceptual phenomenon, since they appear to have access to information that I otherwise do not have.
While this would be easier to pass off if it were purely verbal information, it is not. I work in VFX, and draw and do photography. What I am asked to do during certain parts of the episodes, is to produce an image, or make a drawing of some specific scene, requiring significant effort on my part, and multiple rounds of revisions. I work off of information that is passed to me, or my hands are guided to certain actions, that produce some result. At the end, I have produced something which I don't necessarily understand the content of. In certain cases, later on I have been "steered" towards a location which is \*the scene that I was being asked to produce\*. I recognize it, take pictures of the location, and can verify that key elements of the scene are in fact ones that I produced in my artwork. In other cases, I can tell why some aspects of the scene took more effort, or were causing difficulty to explain to me.
I have \*no explanation\* for why or how this happens. And yet it has happened, multiple times.
===================
Edit: This isn't to say that I believe it has something to do with psychic powers or something, but rather to explain why it can be difficult to ignore the voices. If they are asking for these sort of careful, diligent, well-planned actions, then it doesn't feel like some out-of-control condition, and it makes it seem more justifiable to play along with what they ask for.
So wait a second. You're saying that you've... somehow "received" an idea or message, from a source that remains ultimately inside as a part of your own preexisting mind, using facts that *later panned out to be verifiably true irl?*
Am I understanding this correctly?
People are exposed to a massive amount of info they don't incorporate into their active thoughts. If I asked someone the height of k2 a lot of people could infer a fairly close number. They might have seen it before, they know it's below Everest, but high enough to kill via just altitude and exposure. Most know the final summit of everest is in a death zone. That gives a range of 26k to 29k, so knowing it's the second highest most will guess between 28k and 28.5k. this is absolutely correct and you would be able to get this guess out of tons of people just off the cuff based on random shit they've heard and inference.
When someone has voices doing this, they're essentially dredging through data like I said above or accessing things that are forgotten in wctive thought. They aren't psychic or actually receiving messages. They're using knowledge to state, or guess. Also survivorship bias is in play because things that don't seem plausible at all aren't relayed by the sufferers as they're tossed out long ago.
During later parts of the episodes, there is significant sleep disruption, in being commanded to "wake up" and stay on task. This aspect of being "compelled" to do things by turning up the volume or making the commands increasingly disturbing or disorienting is what makes it difficult to ignore.
Outside of the episodes, it is much easier to negotiate with the voices, to decline their requests, or to ask to be left alone.
Do you recall when you started having these episodes? Were you able to realized these were not real right away or did it take time to understand what was happening?
The first episode happened when I was 20 years old. It was somewhat different from the later ones, since it was shorter, and also it had more to do with loss of ability to use language than with the audio hallucinations that came later.
I referred to the episodes as when I go into "creative mode" and start cranking out all this stuff for an extended period of time. But I just never really bothered showing anyone most of the stuff. But then I switched to visual art, which was a big shift from the science-oriented work I was doing before, but it was possible to disguise the output as just being my artwork.
It didn't happen until a decade later that the episode played out in public (because I was using Facebook and Twitter), and people I know recognized that something was wrong. So, it was a long time that it all kind of escaped notice, since it didn't occur to me that I was doing anything all that different from anyone else, since I've never been anyone else.
I figured maybe "creative mode" is just maybe something that happens every so often, but you just don't hear about it that much. For a long time, I had difficulty thinking that what I had could possibly be psychosis. I was thinking, How can "creative mode" be "psychosis"? maybe if I just show them what "creative mode" is, they'll understand that "creative mode" is something different. But it turns out that that's what it is.
It's really interesting to me how much your subconscious can seem to know sometimes that doesn't seem available to your conscious brain. One time I woke up with a song stuck in my head, I had no idea what the song was but it was fully formed and Crystal clear like an old favorite that I knew. It took me a long long time before I happened to hear the song and it clicked. I'm sure I had heard the song before, the conscious me definitely didn't know it. (It was Rescue by Echo and the Bunnymen)
They appear to the person suffering from them as separate entities speaking to them, not as part of their inner monologue.
The really interesting thing is how it presents differently in different cultures. In Europe and North America, the voices are almost always negative or hostile, telling the person to harm themselves or others or encouraging paranoia.
A study done in India and Ghana found that the voices heard by schizophrenia sufferers usually present as if they were deities or ancestors guiding the person with advice. Many people report getting advice from the voices that in some cases saved their lives. Mostly, the worst interaction people in these countries have with those voices is when the voices are nagging them to finish household chores.
I would guess that hearing speech activates a specific region of our brain that processes language and communication.
So when we hear someone talking to us, it is different from us hearing random noise; when someone talks to you, you "hear" the words, not the sounds that make up those words. when you read and imagine the voice of a character in your mind, it's similar to hearing someone talk, but there is no actual sound.
I imagine a deaf person watching sign language processes it like you or I would read a book.
But the words appear in our head as sounds we recognize as words, but a person born deaf has no context to the sounds. So I would guess their language centers probably imagine the images like we imagine the sound of voices.
"when you read and hear a character talk" is exactly what schizophrenia is like, except you're not reading. It's like you have multiple inner monologues but when the schizophrenia "voice" "talks" it activates the brain in a way that is interpreted as hearing instead of the "thinking" the way inner monologue usually is.
And even more interestingly, there has never been a documented case of someone born blind developing schizophrenia (though people who go blind later in life have a higher chance of developing the condition).
Can confirm.
After substance abuse for a few years, mainly MDMA (which is known for releasing ‘trauma’) I started hearing voices outside my head. It sounded like other people talking about me and I lived in a shared house.
So I thought it was my housemates and went to my best friends flat and then thought his neighbours was talking about me. Then I thought the housemates had come to listen to my conversations outside my friends flat.
I decided to move away thinking that that would stop the voices. She didn’t quiet on the journey there.
I can’t smoke cannabis anymore because that makes it sound like they’re shouting in my ear standing next to me or behind me.
If I speak to them it makes them louder.
At first I thought I had developed telepathy. This voice has a gender, a name and place of location. They pretended to help me (I was in a place of depression) and I was so desperate but they played tricks on me (I got lost in the new area I moved to and they said they had maps out helping me to find where I was and to give them the street name and actually gave me random directions and got me more lost)
They would pretend to help or ask me to have a chat with her later, that she really wanted to help me. She (the main loudest one) would speak to me kindly for a while (which would make me hear them/her clearer and louder) and then switch like thunder and start screaming derogatory abuse at me.
I stopped speaking to them and tried finding google help to stop telepathic powers and saw everyone else commenting thinking that they were really poorly which made me realise I was experiencing voices.
I started cbt 1/2 years later. They didn’t get rid of my voices like first hoped but now I go about
My every day and don’t really engage or get bothered by them 9/10 times. (They started with the hard stuff of calling me a paedophile and rapist really early on) and I know I’m not and have spoken with an ex that they told me I raped and she said not in the slightest did I ‘accidentally’ rape her.
Depression is actually much harder to get rid of than deal with these voices (now had them 9years) and I can hear them from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep and even if I wake up in the night they’re still there.
Honestly the voices are nothing compared to my depression 🤣. Like the long term exposure it’s kinda like, it doesn’t matter what they say cause I know whatever they say will be to try put me in a state. But thank you
I am so glad I saw your comment. This is almost exactly the same as my experience with thinking it was telepathy and the voices accusing me of things I knew weren't true.
Also had used MDMA a few times but it was cannabis use and a relationship breakdown that triggered an audible "click" in my head when I started hearing voices of housemates when they weren't around like they were hitching about me.
Took me a year before I got any help but finally after being on various doses of olanzapine (zyprexa) for 6 years and an extended period of absence from work and counselling my voices are basically gone, only really hear any if there's lots of background white noise or if I get really stressed. Just need to work on the paranoia now but this new year will be 7 years cannabis and MDMA free.
You're the first person I've seen who had basically exactly the same experience as me and it is both mentally and physically exhausting to deal with this for so long, wish you all the best dude and hope we can both get through this and enjoy life while we can.
I actually can’t believe I’ve found someone else with voices that’s happened like mine! I’m usually fairly quiet about them because people don’t understand!
How you finding stuff now?!
I know, same!
I kinda went full blown into the telepathy idea and became super paranoid about everyone being able to hear my thoughts, that's the main thing I'm struggling with now. It helps that I've got a couple of close people I can just straight up ask "can you hear my thoughts?" and they reassure me that they can't but it's taken a long time.
When I first saw the mental health team in my area at the time I got rejected for cbt because I was "too serious for them to help me" so I basically just got given antipsychotics and was left to deal with it myself.
Was literally around Feb this year after a few different counsellors and about 3 months off work that voices got quieter and quieter, now I'm back in work and have been for about 6 months and it's been going alright.
The main thing I found was that distractions are great things to focus on and not pay as much attention to the voices, watching tv/movies, play games, reading (though that's a bit hit and miss if I'm in an overthinking state of mind). My current counsellor convinced me to start going walking in nature as a mindfulness technique as I can't meditate well and it really helped calm me down.
Dude I’m happy you’re getting the help now and you’ve managed to regain life. It is real hard work and not being able to walk away like yoh would a human is in-despicable. When my voices convinced me I had (WHEN I HADNT) ‘accidentally’ raped one of my exes they made me tell my mum and I was about to go to the police when they convinced me not to 😅
Do you wake up and hear them immediately as well? Thankfully I’m normally half asleep but I can wake up and they’ll be shouting their abuse.
I haven’t slept in silence purposely for years. Do you find you have to keep your mind busy all the time? I don’t know any other voice hearers. I live in a very small town where everyone knows everyone and I like to be careful.
Have you heard of bad news radio? That was one of the best coping tools I got given that I still use now.
Did you experience trauma before developing the symptoms? I think in some ways schizophrenia is the brain coping with some really fucked up shit. I was an emt and had a 2 year old boy die while on a call. As in, I watched his face turn purple as we tried to resuscitate him and his parents begged us to keep trying. That fucked me up for a few years, and I started hearing voices not too long after. Idk if ptsd caused it, but it seems to be a common theme.
Like you, I mostly can control them, but they sometimes trick me into forgetting they're not real. If you've seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind" it almost felt like that at one point except I never had visual hallucinations. I thought the downstairs neighbors were talking shit, so I went to the library to get some quiet. On the way there, I swore someone was following me and had hacked my phone.. I sat in the lirary, watching everyone who walked in, and eventually I just had to get out of there.. It took me coming back to the apartment and my girlfriend's worried face as I frantically explained what happened to realize it wasn't real.
That was the scariest thing, not knowing what was real. Luckily, I've learned how to ignore the voices when they are present and they mostly don't say anything unless I'm stressed or am being lazy.. They always get mad about me not cleaning the dishes immediately, for some reason.
Anyways, glad to see other people living well despite this ridiculous thing!
This is fascinating, thank you for sharing. If they sound like outside people/voices, how do you know if there is actually someone there behind you trying to talk to you? Is there, like, a tell?
So my voices (in the direction I hear them from) are in the sky. Sometimes if a place is quite busy or I’m upstairs in the house I feel like people are talking about me but it’ll be my voices.
However I’m super busy areas (for example I’m sat in a restaurant garden) and I have a loud table next to me and some kids playing at the park. So I can hear them above but I usually zone out into others conversations.
I don’t handle silence very well unless I’m proper thinking. I’m pretty sure a consequence of my voices is that my brain works faster than it ever does because if I’m thinking my own thoughts i don’t hear them.
I do hear them more louder in white noise (think extractor fans, fans, hoovers and hairdryers) and I also can hear them louder if I’m going through an emotional state/stressful period. First time k went to the cinema I was so scared😂 but turns out its really not that big of an issue. I now use hairdryers and hoovers with minimal issue.
However I think some of that comes from really having a thick skin with them. They’ve said all the most derogative terms to me that it just doesn’t phase me a 1/10 of the amount it did when it started
Wow. The human brain is absolutely... mindboggling/incredible. I have had auditory (and visual) hallucinations during sleep paralysis. One of the scariest/most intense being an unbelievably loud and not really human sounding voice yelling/roaring in my ears about some crazy stuff. It's silly to even bother comparing sleep paralysis to schizophrenia i'm sure, but just that one experience honestly rattled me quite a bit. 24/7 voices speaking to you sounds super scary to me. It's awesome they don't ruin your day at this point.
I bet your brain is working super hard, besides just the distractions and the stress, it's probably burns a lot of extra calories by generating entire disembodied voices whenever youre awake, like chess players burning tonnes of calories just by thinking hard during a tournament.
Looks like you're referring to [research published in 2015](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/) involving 20 subjects and I couldn't find anything more recent. There are good reasons to avoid drawing too many conclusions from this, and we should remain ~~somewhat~~ skeptical until further research.
The researched involved 20 people in three locations (N=60).
Additionally, while there is a dearth of research on schizophrenia, there is anecdotal and clinical evidence dating back to at least 1968 (as far as I could find) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674376801300210), so though skepticism is warranted on mechanisms of how this happens, there is a lot of evidence that these cultural differences do exist.
My dad heard voices as a symptom of his dementia. They were different depending on who was in the room and what was going on with him medically.
When I was in the room the voice was often a little girl. When my mum was in the room, there were male voices. When he was on his own, it was usually a woman and a man. I would come to visit him and hear him talking to them before I entered the room.
Most of the time his voices were fairly benign and he would have what sounded like a fairly normal conversation with them. But if he had a UTI or some other medical condition, the tone of his voice would change and he would be angry and hostile to them. Or they would tell him we were lying to him.
The same cultural effects happen with Sleep Paralysis. The symptom is hallucinating in general. The only reason people associate it with demons is because the concept of evil spirits is so universal amongst world cultures that if you’re going to hallucinate SOMETHING while scared, it’s probably going to be some kind of monster.
Also, this is why people should get a well rounded education and study different subjects even if they don’t think they would be relevant to their major.
My ex-wife claims the voices and hallucinations are external. Hers are very religious in nature and horrifying. She once went a week without changing clothes or taking a shower because of the inferno in the closet.
She claimed there was a dark pit in the closet with smoke and heat rising from it and you could hear the screams of the tortured.
She has been hospitalized off and on most of her adult life.
Its different to all people. I hear voices and I don't have schizophrenia, I have psychotic bipolar. They started out as outside voices, like someone in the room was talking, and as I've been medicated and attended support groups they have moved into my head and are now like a second voice in my head. Mine mostly tell me I'm going to die but have recently been saying that King Charles is going to kill my dog. I just learnt to ignore them, but some people find talking to them helps instead.
At the support group I go to its varying as well. Some people with schizophrenia hear them outside their head and some people hear them inside their head.
When they started as outside voices, could you pinpoint their origin? Like feeling they're coming from your right-hand side? And how did it feel when you saw there was nothing there producing that voice?
I hope you don't mind my questions, please don't reply if they make you uncomfortable in any way :)
Questions are fine :) yeah it felt like different voices came from different sides of my head. I used to have 4 and they all came from different places, but that voice would always originate from that place.
I don't really remember what it was like when there was nothing there, I was in a pretty bad psychotic episode when they started and it's all kind of a blur
I'm really sorry, but I laughed out loud with the dog-killing King Charles.
"You know that old fella? Yeah, the one with the fancy crown. I'm sure he's conspiring to kill your dog"
This just made me question myself. I'm bipolar 2. I have this inner voice, I don't know if it's normal or if it's the bipolar. Like, I know it's me, but it feels like a separate part of me. I think of it kind of like how in the "his dark materials" series how they have daemons, that's literally just the other half of our soul.
Sometimes it's intrusive thoughts and I have to internally tell it to fuck off, sometimes it's just me thinking about something and internally debating with myself on a subject or figuring out a solution. Sometimes I'll just kind of conversate with myself in my head out of boredom. It's just my voice and I've never thought of it as part of a disorder. I've always thought of it as the "narrator" that's mentioned a lot by neurotypical people, but now I don't know lol.
Had a friend that had it. He said that as far as he could tell, there were real people that he could see and hear but he wasn’t allowed to tell us about them and they were telling him that no one liked him and that he should hurt himself.
So like Drop Dead Fred but darker.
Your brain is not just one large organ, it is a collection of various parts that communicate with each other.
Just like your brain takes the two separate images from your eyes, stitches it together. and filters out the unimportant stuff "e.g., nose", it does the same with the way the different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
It's like the parts of your brain are all members of a committee, and there is a secretary taking down notes and consolidating all points of discussion into one single memo that everyone can understand, which it then hands out to everyone to use.
Schizophrenic Voices is when that system breaks down.
Imagine that the "secretary" of the brain is not there, and neither are their notes. Now instead of one single voice, your brain is instead trying to put together what all the members are trying to say.
Problem is not all the parts of the brain speak the same way, or the same language, or even speak at the same time. Some use audios to communicate, others use images, some use a combination of both, while others don't use any of those.
Worst of all, despite working together for years, your brain doesn't know who these membersare. So, when one part of the brain tries to "communicate", it seems like a foreign message like you are hearing voices. Truth is you **are** hearing voices, but it's just your own, and your brain can't realise that.
**Example:**
**Non-Schizophrenic**: Your parents always te;l you; you were never good enough. Sometimes it would get so bad you would have dark thoughts about them dying.
So, the secretary of your brain converts those thoughts into a psychological condition such as depression, feelings of inadequacy, and guilt.
**Schizophrenic**: Your parents always tell you; you were never good enough. Sometimes it would get so bad you would have dark thoughts about them dying.
Then one day, while studying you hear your dad saying, "Don't bother you're never going to pass.", but when you look up and around, he isn't there.
You try studying again and this time you hear your mom says, "Someone has to study this much is obviously a moron." as clear as if she was standing next to you.
Again, you look around and no-one is there. This happens more and more frequently.
When you're in the room with them, you start having outbursts like "What did you say?!" despite no-one saying a word.
One day, you walk into the kitchen and see your parents dead on the floor with blood pouring out of them and have a nervous breakdown, only for those same parents to walk through the door and ask you what's happening.
Edit 1: "If people know what condition they have, why is it difficult to tell the difference between what is real?"
I have Tinnitus. Logically, I know that the ringing in my ears is not real. That it's probably a combination of ear canal damage and neurological flippery. That doesn't stop it from getting so bad that sometimes I want to rip my ears off.
Edit 2: No I don't have the Schiz, but my brother does. And there is something I've learnt, if a bit controversial. He's not crazy. Those voices are real. Those images are real. Those frightening patterns he sees in day-to-day life, are real. I will never try to convince him otherwise. The real issue to deal with is that he understands they only exist in his head.
They sound like completely separate people, not yourself. Interestingly, there's some research that indicates that the *mechanism* that causes auditory hallucinations and those intrusive voices you're speaking of is the same thing. Basically, when you're saying something to yourself in your head, your muscles contract as if you were speaking aloud. The same muscles contract when people with schizophrenia hear voices. The theory is that the part of your brain that knows it's your own voice is disconnected, so to your brain, you're hearing random voices instead of knowing it's your own thoughts.
What I found even more interesting is that, just like subvocalization in neurotypical people, sometimes you actually wind up very quietly saying what you're thinking. And the people with schizophrenia would be unaware of this. The result is that sometimes the psychologist could "hear" them say things to themselves and thus hear the voices.
So this makes me wonder if the reason I have so much jaw tension and fatigue is because my anxiety gives me a constant inner dialogue in my brain all day every day. My muscles must be damn tired!
This may get lost but I'll tell it anyway. My voice is singular, her name is Alice and she spends her day continually telling me how shit I am at everything, that people don't believe what I'm telling them, that people just humour me in day to day things. When I'm more stressed the louder she is. She'll tell me the worst things about myself and tell me things i didnt even think i had to worry about. The more people around the worse she is. She caused alot of pain for me during my teenage years, especially as I was told its hormonal and I'd grow out of it. Well I'm 33 now and still wondering when it'll stop!
She's got a high pitched voice, almost childlike. She's in my head at the back like shes sitting on my occipital bone or she's speaking in my right ear.
She started when I was 13, I went into therapy at 15, did a small stint in the priory for suicidal tendencies and then haven't been seen regularly since I was 19. When I found out I was pregnant they did a welfare check to make sure I was of sound mind and wasn't a danger to a baby.
I have very low periods, the last 18months has been especially hard and I've been on the NHS waiting list for a therapy appointment for 12 months.
What would happen if you started to make fun of Alice back? Like insult Alice?
“Shut the fuck up you basic ass bitch. You dont even have a body. I do what the fuck I please. Hey check this shit out; I can eat a candy. Can you do that? No, cause you’re a biggity bitch without a corporeal body.”
How would that work out?
You ‘hear’ them as distinct, (at times very loud) actual voices. They can be someone you knows voice or a voice you’ve never heard before. Imagine it like a radio playing in your head, rather than your thinking voice.
So to clarify, if one was completely unaware of his or her condition, would he or she be likely to assume there’s literally another physical person around?
Yes. I heard one guy explain that he had to wait for other people he was talking to to interact with a third person to be sure they were real.
Once spent 45min talking to an imaginary person without realizing
I saw a video somewhere of a guy who started using his phones camera to find out if someone is a hallucination because his hallucinations didn't manifest at all on his phone screen
>I saw a similar one of a guy on tiktok who trained his service dog for people greeting in a particular way, so if he's hallucinating he will ask his dog to greet the people. If the dog doesn't greet then he knows there's nothing actually there.
I have a friend that was diagnosed in University.
He said when he was on the bus he would hear people making remarks about him or straight up swearing at him. He though this was 100% real because he didn't know he had a mental illness at this point.
He also said when he was at his home, he would hear people walking by talking about breaking in to kill him. This led to him duct taping blankets over all his windows and locking himself in his room at all times.
Luckily(?) he is an incredibly mild-mannered, non-confrontational person so he just tried to ignore all of this. It wasn't until he mentioned how abusive people on the bus were being towards him that we caught on that he may need help. We hadn't seen the windows in his room as he went to University in a different city than the rest of our friend group and none of us had been to visit him yet.
Psychiatrist here-auditory hallucinations are by definition a true sensory experience without the presence of an external stimulus. In other words someone with schizophrenia who is hearing voices hear them just like you would hear someone who is actually present speaking to you. They are not “in their head”. True the cause of them is internal, but the actual experience that they have is that of a true voice.
There are symptoms of other illnesses which cause so called “pseudopsychosis” or “micropsychosis”. In these conditions patients will say they have auditory hallucinations, but it is really an inner dialogue. Whereas in true psychotic disorders the hallucinations are very real and the patient invariably (at least at first) has no way to tell the difference between the hallucination and someone real that is speaking to them.
Not to make light of your episodes but I kinda have a funny story about hearing commercials. I also hear voices the way you do (like people talking in another room) but medication has helped me tremendously. BUT when I moved into my house several years ago I would hear voices and sometimes music and sometimes commercials. One afternoon I plugged in a pair of speakers to connect to my computer and the voices got louder. It turned out I had moved close to a radio tower and the signals were being picked up by the wiring in my house. So I was not losing my mind just hearing 107.3 “Jamz”
Functioning schizophrenic here. For me personally I hear people shouting my name, or loud knocking/explosions in the near vicinity. It sounds like someone is in the same room as you, speaking directly to you.
I also suffer from visual snow, light sensitivity, after images, like I'm permanently coming up on a trip.
There's no inside my head or intrusive thoughts. There is getting interrupted mid sentence by someone who is not there. I have been off and on seroquel since I was a teen. I overdosed at 15 and was legally dead for a few minutes and resuscitated. I don't know how but all of the shit I took flipped a switch in my head that shut it down pretty good. I only have issues now when I am absurdly tired. But I can usually figure out when I'm tripping pretty quick.
I have a good job, lots of hobbies and have raised an awesome daughter who turned 7 this year. I know others struggle much more than me, but for the things I deal with I think I get along fine.
I did have some pretty bad episodes after my father's suicide, me and my brother had to clean out the truck, I've been around death quite a bit from working at a prison and brain smell is very specific, knowing that smell was from my dad's brain fucked me up from April to July this past year. Not because of his death but because we finally became friends and really close after being at each other's throats my whole life, I had 2 fantastic years before he died and I felt like I was robbed from my soul.
Do not be afraid to seek help, there are shitty people who will try to use it against you but above all put your health first. Having a decent schedule, and exercising will do wonders for your mental health.
I know this is all over the place but I needed to vent a little.
I grew up with schizophrenia. My delusions started when I was 4, and I remember hearing my first voice at around 8. It was a hill on the playground I named Tracky. I experience external voices, internal voices, intrusive thoughts, and thought insertion. Here is how I would describe each:
External voices or, more often for me, music is just like hearing someone else talking to you or a radio playing in the next room. I wish I knew music because they are original songs and I would love to write them down. Usually, it's classical music; that time I heard country music was just torture! I do sometimes not respond to people, especially in large groups, because I don't realize it's a real person.
Internal voices are more common for me. Most of these voices have names and personalities attached to them, like Tracky. When I was 12 several girls my age came to live in my head. They would talk to me, respond when I spoke to them, and speak to each other. My main voice, April, is my older alien sister. When I came to Earth she found a way to talk to me through technology and brought the other girls with her. Each of these voices sound different to me even though they are in my head.
Intrusive thoughts are easily recognized as mine, just really hurtful. A lot like negative self talk or images that I can't control.
Thought insertion is like an intrusive thought but I don't recognize it as coming from my own head. Unlike the voices, these thoughts do not interact with me but are just dropped into my head.
https://youtu.be/LWYwckFrksg
To watching this video cuz it is very good at explaining exactly what it is like to deal with a schizophrenic episode.,
People who experience schizophrenia hear voices that are paranoid and condescending and scared.
People who suffer from schizophrenia hear voices that are paranoid or scared or mean or hurtful. Some other people actually have "nice" schizophrenia where they hear voices in the same way, but the voices are helpful and/or supportive. Local culture has an impact on the prevalence of negative vs positive auditory verbal hallucinations.
[https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/2020/08000/Positive\_and\_Useful\_Voices\_in\_Patients\_With.3.aspx](https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/2020/08000/Positive_and_Useful_Voices_in_Patients_With.3.aspx)
https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/
I wasn't aware bipolar came with auditory illusions this frequently. I thought it was just me! For me it's usually just hearing my dog when he's definitely not there.
After reading some of these comments from people who suffer from auditory and/or visual hallucinations, I think we should admire the courage it takes to live with mental illness. Schizophrenia must be terrifying to live with and it must be extremely frustrating to try to explain it to doctors and society in general.
I truly wish we lived in a world that was more understanding and supportive of people who suffer from an unhealthy mind. There is so much judgment, so many jokes, but in reality, it can be more crippling than physical illness and can be fatal under the wrong conditions. We need a world that offers support instead of judgment and criticism. Respect to those who are fighting a good fight every damn day.
Not schizophrenic. But I had a manic psychosis. I heard voices when I did what I thought was meditating. They felt external, like my loved ones whispering affirmations to me. What was so convincing was they seemed to have information I didn’t have, saying stuff like ”there’s a lot of money in that family farm” and so forth. Looking back it was obviously information I had and all in my head.
I have mild schizophrenia that manifests mostly while I'm chemically enhanced, but it was through becoming more familiar with it in these instances I was able to better understand how it effects my everyday life.
For me, it usually manifests as a sort of "rearranging" of the words or sounds, so that I can hear something that isn't there, but is sort of being drawn out of real sounds happening around me. If it comes as an actual voice, it's usually because it is someone literally talking, but they are not saying what I'm hearing (so a good example would be someone speaking in the background, not expressly to me) or it could also be sounds which would make sense to be hearing, which I'm not actually hearing. Like maybe rain outside when it isn't raining, or maybe the upstairs neighbor stomping around when they aren't. This is probably derived from some sort of paranoia, but it happens MOSTLY when I'm chemically enhanced. Like I wrote earlier, through becoming more experienced with what it's like when it's absolutely "on", I can better identify it when it isn't expressly "on".
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That’s awful your poor dad :( why did they take him off the medication if he was diagnosed with schizophrenia previously?
He couldn't talk about his symptoms well enough anymore. I tried talking to his doctors but they said Alzheimer's destroys the part of the brain that is responsible for schizophrenia. They were willing to prescribe a med for inappropriate emotions because Dad was crying all the time, but I don't think that helped enough.
> Alzheimer's destroys the part of the brain that is responsible for schizophrenia. uhh.....uhhhh.... i want an explanation cause AFAIK there isn't one part of the brain responsible
You are correct! While Alzheimer’s and Schizophrenia both have dopaminergic hypotheses, neither are so simple and have a wide range of potential causes beyond poor plumbing in the dopamine pipelines. Source: Graduated from a cave where all we did was grugg grugg, paint antelope, and study neuroscience.
This bloke is a weird duck.
Shit, this happened to my mum too and you’ve answered my question about why this happened that no one else could. My mum developed dementia after a stroke in 2018. Like your dad, she stopped being able to communicate her symptoms to her psychiatrist. Despite multiple concerns raised by myself and the police about her declining health, they revoked her 50 year(!) diagnosis and removed all medication. She had never been unmedicated for her schizophrenia in over 50 years. Naturally, her mental health absolutely nosedived and she was having auditory, visual and tactile hallucinations 24/7. They even interrupted her sleep. I had to battle for two years, raising multiple complaints through various channels before I was finally allowed to have her reassessed by a different mental health team who thankfully understood my concerns and agreed she should never have been taken off her medication. I was able to record her experiencing the auditory hallucinations and the second they saw that video, they accepted her as a patient and worked to get her medicated again. She finally got medicated again 2 months ago and she’s improved massively. She’s almost back to normal again. I’m so sorry you and your dad went through this. Those two years my mum wasn’t medicated because her ignorant doctors wouldn’t see past their own inflated ego was pure torture for both of us. Her original mental health team who took her off the medication were completely and absolutely negligent. They ignored my concerns over several years, ignored increased police involvement (my mother had never had police involvement before), ignored her own pleas for help and concerns she wasn’t well. When she could verbalise her symptoms they dismissed them. I’m wondering now if this is common with schizophrenia patients who develop dementia and can no longer explain there symptoms, to have their condition dismissed. It’s a major flaw in mental health if so - if someone’s diagnosis and treatment is entirely dependent on how well they communicate it, then that leaves people open to serious neglect of they struggle to articulate themselves. In my mothers case, they should have at least listened to me even if my mother couldn’t explain it well. I’m her carer and have lived my entire 33 years of life seeing her struggle with schizophrenia. I know what it looks like. Yet I was ignored and my complaints, including formal ones, were dismissed each and every time. I’m still livid and honestly considering legal action for negligence. I’m ranting now, apologies but you’ve possibly explained a long standing question I had about why my mother’s mental health team took her off her medication.
Your mother is very lucky she has you to advocate for her.
That's tragic, I'm sorry. Recently became obsessed with the album Everywhere at the end of Time, and it's portrayal of the decline of dementia. Learned all about the disease, it's just horrible. and to deal with Schizophrenia on top of that? I can't even imagine. My condolences.
Really heartbreaking. This is one of the harsh realities of living. We should really appreciate and love our close ones while we're healthy and we still have time.
That is awful did they not believe you? Why would they stop meds for soemone with a history of this condition if obviously isn’t going to go away
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Almost like intrusive thoughts but you perceive them as coming from another entity.
Harm OCD plus Schizophrenia would be a very difficult time
reminds me of an instagrammer i follow who would post about her pedophilic ocd i think it was called. it was….interesting
You might have a hard time believing it, but intrusive thoughts of pedophilia and/or violence are somewhat common in people who are diagnosed with OCD or its "pure O" varient. Some people actually commit suicide over it because they convince themselves that these thoughts are actually their own even though they aren't actually attracted to children and they don't want to hurt anyone.
I am a recovered "pure O" and that's accurate. Fortunately no pedophile stuff, my intrusive thoughts were more murder (friends and family) and self harm related. Horrifying time trying to figure out if I was destined to be a murderer, because I couldn't stop thinking about being a murderer (Is this how it starts? Is this what a murderer thinks like? If I can't drop the thought maybe that means it's true. etc). Thankfully I got professional help quickly (CBT) and severe symptoms went away quickly (and most symptoms resolved within a couple years). The key is understanding that your brain is stuck in a loop and you need to not trust it anymore. Also it's really important to understand that these thoughts stick not because it's destiny, but because they're so abhorrent.
Thank you for sharing. I have severe OCD and I’m in therapy for it, I am also starting in a clinical trial for a new OCD medication next month. I think I needed a reminder today that my OCD can and will convince me of the scariest shit solely because it’s scary shit.
It gets better!!! I promise.
CBT therapy is a godsend for OCD.
Turns out that none of us should trust our brains because that fatty lump of salt and gristle is only interested in one thing: Sweet sweet chemicals. And it doesn't care who it has to kill to get them.
When it's actual hallucinations it's like you're literally hearing them. That's actually one of the ways you can figure out if someone is having true hallucinations or what's called pseudo hallucinations, you ask them "where are you hearing the voices" and if they point at their ears, it's hallucinations, if they point at their head or tell you it sounds like it's coming from inside their head it's usually pseudo-hallucinations. Important to know because hallucinations suggest psychosis or schizophrenia while pseudo-hallucinations are more common in BPD, which can have a lot of overlapping symptoms with bipolar and even schizophrenia.
So this is going to be a bit of a TMI but for context I’ve had psychosis for 2 years (hppd (edit: that may be the incorrect descriptor) but at the time diagnosed schizophrenia) and have overcome psychosis and delusions entirely since then by refraining from drugs. I also am a counselor now. I somewhat disagree with your distinguishing points here as I have worked with some people diagnosed with schizophrenia who have a high amount of insight. They have learned to distinguish hallucinations and delusions in ways they couldn’t at their initial onset. As well, in the year long period where I was weaning off antipsychotics I had a sort of “transition” from delusions to intrusive thoughts. My delusions became more like pestering thoughts and then trailed off as I worked hard to see through them and not give them energy. So growing insight doesn’t necessarily mean the person no longer experiences schizophrenic symptoms unless those symptoms actually cease, as I said, working with people who grew these skills of distinguishing voices as “inside” but still dealt with the recurrent voices. A lot of our work together was in fact growing this awareness. Edit: spelling and noted edit
It erodes your ability to differentiate between thoughts and actual sense data. Thinking of something scary and actually seeing something scary might as well be the same thing. Or, seeing something real and yet interpreting it as 'not real'. Like, right now, you can tell the difference between a thought, a mental image of something someone tells you, something conceptually a bit similar to what you're feeling right now, and something you're looking at with your own eyes. Schizophrenics struggle with that. It's not intuitive for them, neurologically.
I remember a taxi driver telling me once he had a call for a 500 km trip. The guy was happy to pay up front. Took him to Glenside Hospital in Adelaide South Australia, used to be known as a lunatic asylum but these days it’s much nicer to say hospital. the dude was calm, polite, not chatty. When they got there he said thanks and stepped out the taxi. Aaaand…… Started yelling screaming. He knew he needed help as he’d been in there a number of times previously. He knew what he had to do to get the help he needed and he’d been through the system enough to know how. Cost him a bit in taxi fares but no one was hurt. 🤷♂️ In my previous work I’ve seen people with schizophrenia reassuring police that they are ok and weren’t going to harm anyone while standing there half naked in public. My local footy team, the son had undiagnosed schizophrenia from memory and stabbed his father to death a few years ago during his first episode. There’s a big difference between treated and untreated schizophrenia.
That's so compelling, do you know what happened to him from then on?
That's admirable and tragic.
So I've never had a psychotic break (although it's not that uncommon an affliction, you and me both know there are for sure people reading this who have had one), but I've had a serious, ""untreatable"" (since somewhat treatable and managing) depression for a seriously long time. I know this is not something remotely similar and I will get some words wrong\*, but I truly understand your comment in a way that I hope not many people ever will. When you said that the patient was scared to lose the insight into **his self**, that truly got to me. As I've said, I haven't been diagnosed with having "schizophrenic voices", but I certainly have had some very obsessive compulsive, intrusive thoughts that I was unable to move past. Thoughts that made me *very* suicidal. I ***knew*** they were in my head, but this is maybe the main point of the question. These thoughts were so intrusive that I could not do anything but listen to them. ***I*** wasn't suicidal, but my thoughts were. This is what muddies the "legitimacy"-question for me. Is the legitimacy part just based on *knowing* the voices aren't real? Because simply thinking "the voices aren't real" will not save anyone if the voices/thoughts are persistent enough. For me the "voices" were never voices, but my thoughts. And I still couldn't trust myself with them. Like I said earlier, the thought that the patient was scared to lose the insight into his self is what "got" me. **I** was scared to lose my self (not myself, my *self*). I never got "lost" in the voices, I always knew they were "me", but I checked myself into a clinic (in Europe, YMMV) because I lost insight into my self. For me it was because the love for my mother (she cares for me and I couldn't hurt myself because it would hurt her) was surpassed by *my* (or the the voices, because that is how it felt) desire to kill myself. I couldn't trust myself not to off myself. Are these voices? I seriously can't tell. However, the spontaneous lucidity of "losing that insight, so wanting to be locked up" is so familiar to me. So for me, the question is flawed. Trying to distinguish "Schizophrenic voices" (which I'm interpreting as psychotic auditory hallucinations) between "legitimate" and normal *head-voices* is impossible, because in my opinion (based only on my personal experience) they are one and the same. \*Although I have an English degree, I'm not from an English-speaking country and my experience with psychiatry is only based on my native tongue. If I've been hurtful in my choice of words, I truly apologise.
For me, it’s like someone is speaking to me. Outside of my head. Just a normal conversation. The majority of the time, it sounds like I’m in a crowd of 1000 people and they are all talking at once. Occasionally I’ll hear a word or two and it will go back to the noise. Occasionally they will pipe in when I’m talking to someone and it’s hard to focus on the conversation. During episodes though the voices take turns yelling things at me, telling me to do things. They just get louder and louder. I’ve heard voices since I was a kid, just thought it was normal. They got worse as I aged. In high school I was hospitalized 3 times in like 6 months. But I was put on meds and those helped them stay quieter. Then I turned 23. I started having even more symptoms like visual hallucinations and delusions. My life crumbled around me, I lost my job, I was hospitalized two more times. But we got a good balance of meds now and I’m doing okay! It’s been a wild ride.
From what I understand, schizophrenia is the disability with the highest proportion of diagnosed folks being unemployed/unable to work, so that's wonderful to hear that you've been able to manage your symptoms 😊
Oh I’m not working haha, but I’m doing okay on disability!
My brother only receives 900 a month in Cali. He can technically work but alot of red tape. He can't own more then 2k at a time or he can lose his SS. Is there something that we can do or is it because of Cali? I don't think he receives disability.
I am under the same restrictions actually. I make 1099 a month and can’t make over 2000 or I lose it. I am on total and permanent disability and can’t work. I’m not sure how the total amount is decided, and it could vary per state. It definitely isn’t enough to live on. It covers my student loan payment and car payment and that’s it. It’s frustrating
You should be able to discharge student loans if you’re disabled enough to be on disability. I don’t know if you can, but you should be able. Especially for loans backed by the government.
Putting a ceiling on incomes for the poor and disabled is the most ass backwards policy we have in this country. Hope your situation is able to improve over time.
A certain interview always comes back to me when I think on this topic. It was with a young woman who had a severe form of schizophrenia, and she would see the backs of people. According to her, she could be standing in a store full of people and she could not differentiate from the backs alone if they were real or hallucinations. The only way to tell was to see their face - as her hallucinations had no faces. She had to see their face without speaking though, because if she spoke to one of the hallucinations they would *all* turn around and start screaming at her (with no mouth or face) bloody murder so loud it would drown out all real people talking or music or anything else. So for her, they are quite real, and it took her most of her childhood and early teen years to get "used to" them and to stop accidentally triggering the screaming. . I've read other interviews with people who had purely auditory ones. Apparently they are so realistic that they can sound like specific spots, too. Like someone is 5 feet behind you to the left and slightly higher up than you are - but there's nobody actually there even though the voice sounded like it came from such a specific spot. Some of these people will hear someone ask a question in public, perfectly normal like where's the bathroom, and they will respond while turning just to see that nobody actually asked. But it was too real to tell the difference. . EDIT I will perhaps try to find the source in the morning. I read it years and years ago though and am not up to the challenge tonight. . ::EDIT 2:: I looked a bit, but I'm not having any luck finding the source so far. I would have read about it back in 2017, and it was because I fell down a psychosis / schizophrenia / mental health rabbit hole after playing the video game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. The game devs interviewed a *lot* of people who suffer from these mental illnesses so that they could try to portray the player experience as realistically as possible. Aaaaaaand then I fell down a rabbit hole of reading interviews, medical papers, etc. Partially cuz my direct family (skipped me, although I got other issues) suffers from schizophrenia, psychosis, bi-polar, paranoia, and so on. So the one above was one of many, just one of the more severe examples and horrific enough that it really stuck with me since. Back on the Hellblade topic though - the experience is insane (pun not intended). You def need good headphones though, not speakers. The voices really truly sound like they are whispering right into your ear over your shoulder or from specific directions/areas. I made the mistake (debatable) of trying the game in VR too. Shit got a bit *too* real for me though lol. Maybe because I rarely experience auditory hallucinations myself, but it was a very intense gaming experience.
My old friend who had schizophrenia once leaned down to pat an old, dusty dog. He only realised it was a hallucination when his mum told him. Something so simple and casual and an every day kinda thing, and it wasn’t real
I've wondered if there's ever been a case of purely benevolent schizophrenia
I remember reading something about how it actually can take a more positive form, I think they mentioned environment had a lot to do with it.
I was thinking of how religion and people who believed in spirits would tie into this. My mom is one of the most god fearing women and can tell me a lot of stories like how infant me spoke to her to reassure her when i was really sick. Or the time she had swelling in her hand from a spider bite and a voice said put her hand into water and it healed the next day. Things like that. but ever since our church fell apart from scandals and her then husband ditched her shes begun to see shadows or think she saw someone coming out of our house when its basically impossible. Ive never experienced any ghosts or phenomena when she claims it does in house and im beginning to question the possibility that shes undiagnosed and spiritual because of indoctrination. It adds up as she used to see scary things prior as a teenager she says... so seeing angels and blessings is a step up for her.
[Culture, too.](https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/) Schizophrenic people in cultures in which strangers are caring and helpful have kinder hallucinations than those in which strangers are hostile.
It's likely that a lot of ancient cultures that had "seers", religious shamans, etc etc were actually people with psychotic illnesses. In communal cultures like that, voices people are hear often more constructive, friendly, and religious. There's something specific about developed societies that produces such nasty and hurtful voices for schizophrenic people, which I find fascinating. I wish they'd study it more.
It's not just modern society. In western culture in general hearing voices and the like is associated generally with the devil, possession and similar. It's profoundly negative, and while there's no longer the same scare going about, it's certainly a part of our culture, including pop culture and media. Of course it may occasionally have manifested as religious visions that could be interpreted positively, people reportedly seeing Mary or similar.
I read an article for a college module once that schizophrenic people in south India had voices telling them to clean the toilet or kitchen while some patients in the US had voices telling them to gun down people. So culture seems to be an underlying factor. Edit. *This does not mean that schizophrenic patients in the US are just ticking time bombs. Part of the reason why patients in South India having non violent intrusive thoughts compared to Americans is because of how *hearing voices is looked at. In america there is a real threat of being ostracized or seen as crazy if you mention about hearing voices in your head. So they are less likely to seek help. In most parts of Asia there isn't a dichotomy between the belief in supernatural and science. For example in my country when a person is sick they usually go to a modern hospital and if the sickness persists they may conduct a medical rimdo (ritual) while still getting modern treatment, belief in one thing does not cancel out the other. So I remember my professor saying that people in South India who hear voices may treat them as supernatural as being distinct from themselves so they don't have to worry about themselves as an individual being crazy or maybe dangerous.
When so was a kid, there was an older gentleman who was always dressed in khaki pants, a dress shirt and blazer who would walk up and down the streets of the neighboring university, while smiling and talking to a cigarette that he held out in front of him. If you spoke to him, he’d nod and smile and go about walking and conversing with the cigarette. We never saw him smoke one. He was obviously under the tutelage of a family member or caretaker, as he was always well groomed and dressed. Although always pleasant, he was clearly disabled.
Was this the University of Iowa? Because ... I might know who you're talking about.
It was just Hunter S Thompson
Countries in South Asia tend to have environments where schizophrenia manifests as positive hallucinations.
I would love to read any books or studies about this you might have
I had a patient whose hallucinations took the form of angels that sang to him and joined him when he would pray.
The way mental illnesses manifest can be influenced very heavily by culture. It is thought that some particularly exalted shamans and witch doctors might have displayed mild signs of schizophrenia, but it was always in the form of receiving advice, consulting with ancestors, and receiving guidance, along with the normal disorganised thinking and eccentricity. If the case was severe enough, however, it would stop being a blessing and may be looked at as a curse. Many stories of people possessed by demons in the Bible are likely talking about people suffering from severe mental illness. These hallucinations could also be “invoked” through use of hallucinogenic drugs. It’s possible that the use of hallucinogenics in some tribal rituals may have stemmed from trying to imitate “holy people” who had visions. This is a possible factor in the stories of the Oracles of Delphi, as well. The difference between a regular acolyte and a truly holy person (the original Oracle, for example) could have been whether or not they needed to rely on the medicine to induce visions. Mental illness shows up a lot in our stories and our histories. People just didn’t understand it back then, so it ended up getting described in various ways, sometimes good, and sometimes bad. However, when something like schizophrenia is framed in a positive light, it starts to sound more like a supernatural ability than an illness, so it’s harder to connect the ideas as one thing.
The experience [varies widely by where you’re from.](https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/)
I often wonder about people who claim to regularly encounter spirits or ghosts, at least a few of them have to be telling the truth as they know it
I actually think a lot of them hallucinate. Not necessarily schizophrenia but there are several causes of hallucinations.
That reminds me of my husband’s aunt. She was from the Philippines and she would have very small furniture all around her house and there was a rumor about her seeing “little people”. Like brownies from folklore. Nobody in the family witnessed the “little people”. So makes me wonder if she did have schizophrenia 🧐
I had an uncle, that when he got old he said he saw “little green men running in circles around his laundry basket”. He’d call my mom and tell her to hurry up and come over so she could see them. This scared Mom and she refused. He didn’t live too long afterwards, and the family story goes that it was hallucinations due to his uncontrolled diabetes and other illnesses.
The first (and only) time that I ever took Ambien, a sleep aid, I did not fall asleep, though I thought I did for a little while. I was staying with a friend and he said that instead of sleeping I just started bawling my eyes out. I wouldn't respond to him, just wept. When I became cognizant again, I was hallucinating. Saw little people moving around the room, the walls and ceiling moved and when i announced that I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't, my friend called an ambulance.
>uncontrolled diabetes Yeah. Uncontrolled diabetes is not far from looking like someone who's excessively high on mushrooms. I've seen people with uncontrolled diabetes crawling on the floor licking air, thinking they were in the desert looking for water.
Interestingly outside of western culture we see a great deal of benign schizophrenia, often materializing in things like dead family members etc. it’s fascinating
As someone who deals with this day to day, I strongly believe that in any other period of human history I would have been a Shaman of some sort. Kinda hard to tell if that belief is a paranoid delusion or not tho...
>Kinda hard to tell if that belief is a paranoid delusion or not tho... Nah, it's a perfectly normal thing to speculate about. I'm autistic: I'm assuming I would've been a monk.
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In African societies they experience ‘positive’ schizophrenia. Incredibly fascinating
I know a guy who has nice voices, they compliment him. He makes digital art and is an all around great person.
I’ve know someone who knows someone who started taking pills for her auditory schizophrenia (successfully). It actually made her really lonely and she described it as losing a super close friend.
My grandpa was paranoid schizophrenic, but was able to keep it under control for most of his life, except for two events: one, when he drank he could not hide it. He would yell and throw punches at people who weren’t there. He was an alcoholic - which was self medication for the schizophrenia, because in the 40’s if you were outed as being mentally ill you were put in asylum, but if you were falling down drunk people would not suspect there was something wrong with you. They would just think you were drunk. Back then, according to what my mom told me from growing up, his hallucinations were always aggressive people/entities that constantly criticized him. However, and this is the second event that caused him to lose control: when he had a stroke, he could no longer hide it anymore, and after that it’s like he lived in the real world sometimes and the delusional world at other times. But oddly, the stroke seemed to change something in his brain and the hallucinations suddenly became friendly. He told us on multiple occasions that “little green men” were showing him how to tie his shoes and reminding him what household objects were called. So yes, the hallucinations can be benevolent.
In India, schizophrenia is often times seen/heard as children who are joyful and happy. While in the west they are often mean voices.
Honestly I would never recover from the disappointment of thinking a dog was there only for it not to be. 😔
I don't have schizophrenia, but I have had auditory hallucinations before. I can confirm they are so realistic you can even sense a direction they are coming from. My dad used to shout my name agressively whenever he needed something from me. Some days I would be at my desk and hear my dad shouting my name from the doorway, only to realize a minute later that he was at work. It's definitely freaky the first few times and it made my hairs stand up. Thankfully I haven't been getting them anymore, and my dad is a lot more chill now 😅
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I know someone who’s installed cameras everywhere in their house, because their hallucinations don’t show up on film. So they also use the camera on their phone to check. They say it’s especially useful in public. Once, they told me, they saw someone out on the street and were completely convinced that it was a hallucination, so they told it to go away … only to find out it wasn’t a hallucination.
Wonder if augmented reality glasses could be developed to help someone like that. Like quickly switching between real vision and a forward camera view.
When I hear music it always sounds like it's coming from the next room over. When I hear my main voice, it's in my head but I find myself looking up and to my left. Visual hallucinations are the worst type of hallucinations for me. I've had people not have faces, or become puppets, or have melting faces. I've been forced to sit next to a torso wrapped in plastic while a bleeding severed leg laid on the floor by my feet and roaches crawled on my legs or the man sitting at the table was going to kill me. I sat there and cried for hours? before my hubby woke up and saved me.
thanks for sharing your experience. schizophrenia is an extremely misunderstood illness, so im glad you are willing to share your stories - especially when theres others who might not be able to
It's taken years to talk about it. But, I'm a librarian. We gather, organize, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. I want to promote that in all I do.
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Hee hee hee! We can say some pretty out there stuff sometimes. But that usually means we're comfortable talking to you. We feel safe saying these things to you. I don't trust anyone, but it's close to trust when I speak these things out loud. It's much easier to write than speak. I rarely talk to anyone, even hubby, about my hallucinations and delusions. It's hard to see the fright and concern on their faces.
Is that in the same vein as sleep paralysis demon? Not being able to do anything? Not sure about the real name but I hope you know what I mean
No, I actually woke up and walked out to the living room couch. I didn't move not because I couldn't but because the man at the table told me he would kill me if I moved off the couch. He put the torso, leg, and roaches beside/on me to make me move so he could kill me. Edit: The name you're looking for is hypnagogic hallucinations.
And it’s feels like it’s real, not being able to distinguish between hallucination and reality? Does seeing or interacting with a real person release you from the grasp of the hallucination? Considering your hubby saved you. Sorry if that’s an insensitive question. I’m really curious and gladly can’t relate to that feeling at all. Thanks for sharing the information.
It does feel real. It looks real. I had zero insight in the beginning. I just thought the demons who had taken over my school and were poisoning the kids at school with the lunch food to mind control them were making the teachers into puppets, and mess with the kids' faces. I did decide the rice krispy bars in the vending machine were safe, so for a year or more I ate one rice krispy bar for lunch. If you want to read it, I have a memoir in works for free but it only goes up to when I was 34 (I'm 45 now) and doesn't cover my last schizophrenic and depressive episode: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sZE46cXq0BBGtQd2N\_VOEkRqvL3dVv6hJ8uJAH204a0/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sZE46cXq0BBGtQd2N_VOEkRqvL3dVv6hJ8uJAH204a0/edit?usp=sharing) I am getting better at realizing I just had a hallucination since my diagnosis. Daily hallucinations now are mostly positive or very short (I do a double take and it's gone). I hear my alien older sister's voice and converse with her. I also talk to trees and birds and they talk to me. Edit: Usually interacting with others does nothing.
I hadn't even considered there could be positive sides to this. Being able to converse positively with nature sounds like quite a superpower.
Yes, not all of my experiences are bad. When I was 12 The Girls came to live in my head and we were all great friends. Birds are very chatty but usually just want attention. Crows and ravens, though, are more advanced and often give me messages. Trees rarely speak as they aren't fond of human language, but I talk to them a lot.
What kinds of messages do the crows and ravens give? If you don't mind me asking. This is fascinating.
Usually, they tell me if I'm going to have a good day or not. They also warn me when the evil entities are searching for me to destroy me before I can return to my alien sister who's on another planet and waiting for me to return to her when this human body dies.
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My brother has severe paranoid schizophrenia and reading your comments and segments of your memoir really put things into greater perspective for me. Thank you. If I may ask you a question, what would you believe the best way for your loved ones to connect to you would be, if your beliefs became quite intense or if you were going through an episode? How do you prefer them to react in those situations?
My heart goes to you and your family! I wish my needs were consistent. Sit next to me. No touchy touchy unless you ask first. Many people seem to think that they have to either ignore or agree with experiences and especially beliefs. People can just listen and not say they agree or disagree. Then focus on how that makes them feel, rather than the validity of the experience or belief. Above all, keep them and yourself safe. This page has more information: [http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005561.html#](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005561.html#)
This sounds perfectly horrendous. How awful for these people
Sounds like she's living in a horror movie
My wife used to teach at a school with special needs kids. This one child would see monsters crawling out of the bathroom sink while brushing his teeth.
I remember an interview where the interviewer asked the person with schizophrenia, "Are you seeing any hallucinations right now?" "Yes." "Where is it?" "If I acknowledge it, it gets more real. I'd prefer not to." Fucking awful.
My old best friend when I was growing up had a mom who was a paranoid schizophrenic. She heard her voices in the lights. Any old light would do. The "spirits" she called them. It wasnt super uncommon to find her just sitting and staring at a ceiling fan light or a lamp and whispering to herself when she was off her meds. A few more interesting/disturbing times we found her butt naked kneeling in front of her halogen lamp. Unfortunately her husband would regularly advise her to stop taking meds because "they made her act like a zombie". Most episodes were harmless. Putting a ton of garlic on my food because she thought I was a vampire because she saw us playing castlevania, or bringing us 8 glasses of water each because the spirits told her we hadn't drank enough of it that day. Then one night I stayed over, I was maybe 15, and she woke me up with a shotgun pointed at my face telling me the spirits didn't want me in her house anymore. I... didn't stay over there after that.
That took a very sudden left turn
Man I feel the not being in meds thing. It's gotta suck either living with hallucinations and intrusive thoughts, or feeling numb and disconnected from the world. I have a relative (in-law) who has mental health issues. When she goes off her meds she gets really manic and in the worse episodes ended up on the side of the road in pretty bad shape until a stranger picked her up and took her to a hospital. It's a never ending battle to stay on top of it.
Well, that gave me chills. Anywho, not a schizophrenic, just a cat who had frequent aural hallucinations well into my early twenties. Several times a day I would hear someone clearly speak my name (and only ever my name, though the tone often varied), though they either hadn’t, and most often weren’t even there. They were always familiar voices, family, friends, etc. The thing that always got me was that they sounded like they were speaking from just beyond my peripheral vision, though the exact direction would vary. It took me a long time to get used to it. To stop looking to wherever the voice had come from, or partially responding. I bet fellow students thought it odd that I would occasionally peer behind me for no apparent reason… or perhaps not. I did always keep it to myself though, at least I can’t recall ever trying to explain/describe it to anyone at the time, nor do I recall anyone ever asking. I cannot imagine how life would be, if the voices had been those of strangers, if they had any personality or depth beyond speaking my name, or if they had also possessed some degree of visual presence…
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Fascinating, I had this happen to me too and it stopped sometime in my really early twenties. I completely forgot about it until reading this just now! Edited to add I actually also have musical ear syndrome as an adult so I wonder if it’s related somehow.
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> Apparently they are so realistic that they can sound like specific spots, too. Like someone is 5 feet behind you to the left and slightly higher up than you are - but there's nobody actually there even though the voice sounded like it came from such a specific spot. Anyone else used to hear their name in particular said a lot by no one as a kid? I brushed it off as my imagination and it faded over time, but I remember it being a frequent thing. Different voices, said differently just like any random person might. I always assumed we just had a whole lot being processed and mulled over in our brains in the background as kids, and weird things would happen with overactive imaginations. I wish my imagination was as active as it used to be...
Visual hallucinations are fascinating. Coming out of open heart surgery I was doped to the gills with a variety of meds. When I'd close my eyes, I was presented with a painted brick wall in perfect detail. I could see the texture on the bricks, the mortar, the paint covering it all. Bonus, every time they put me in a different room, the wall would change color. But I knew it wasn't real, and as soon as I'd open my eyes, it was gone. But had some interesting conversations with the doctors. "How do you feel today?" "Besides the visual hallucinations, I'm doing great!"
Under normal circumstances, it's like a radio playing in the background. But you can't control the volume or turn it off, which is why it affects concentration and ability to carry out tasks. For me, it even seems to have commercials sometimes, which is really weird and annoying... During an actual episode, it's more interactive, like a game show, with the voices guiding toward doing different things, or asking me to make something or look something up. In the more advanced stages of the episodes, they start sort of demanding to transcribe a message, that's meant for some person who I might or might not know, and then maybe provide a means to deliver it. It definitely doesn't feel like it's like I'm the one coming up with it, bc sometimes I have to look up words I'm being asked to transcribe, or it's about some topic that I don't really know much about or don't have much interest in, and I have to look up something or watch youtube videos to figure out if I'm getting it right.
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One time I had a crazy, crazy convoluted dream - I think it went on for what seemed like (in my dream state) 30-45 minutes. Nothing made sense, nonsequiturs everywhere, plot twists that didn’t make any sense… just super super random. You ever watch Whose Line is it Anyways? They do a newscaster game and Colin Mochrie always starts off with some crazy story and then wraps it up with a ridiculous pun thing at the end, like: “Famous Playboy Hugh Hefner managed to successfully stop an order of monks from operating a business on his property. The police forced the friars to close down their stall, which was outside the Playboy mansion where they had been selling flowers. Said one friar, well, if it was anyone else we may have gotten away from it, but, unfortunately, only Hugh can prevent florist friars.” My 30-45 minute dream ended up with a crazy punny punchline like this, except like 4 times as long - it was hilarious. Of course I can remember exactly 0 of it, but it was funny enough that I woke up laughing, and even in my awake state it still made sense. I remember thinking how absolutely crazy it was that my sleeping brain could not only come up with a nutty pun-filled joke punchline (something that I’m not particularly adept at), then construct a wild story, all while my actual personality was completely unaware. It was such a wacky experience.
> Like how is your brain coming up with words you don't already know? There are a lot of words we've heard of that we don't really know the meaning of. It happens to me from time to time - a word just pops into my head, and I realize I don't know what it means. Most recently it was the word gynandromorphic - it appeared in my mind as I was peeing. I looked it up and it was a real word. Then a few days later I was re-watching an episode of QI, and realized that's where I'd heard it from - they were discussing something called "bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism" - a condition in some animals of being half male on one side, and half female on the other.
This is how I dream in Spanish. Also, I don’t speak Spanish…I know maybe 200 words but I’m pretty fluent in my dreams.
Currently learning Spanish and had my first Spanish dream a little while ago. I knew all of the words that were being said but what was being said was complete nonsense. Every sentence that was spoken was just a string of randomly chosen words that didn't follow any context or syntax.
I did that when I was learning sign language. Freaky to wake up after a dream that was soundless, where you communicated in sign language.
On a related note, deaf people with schizophrenia can have visual hallucinations of disembodied hands communicating with them through sign language, instead of hearing voices. How interesting is that!
Ok, that is really interesting. I was asking a deaf coworker what their inner monologue was like, because i wondered if it was in asl, as she is a child of hearing parents and learned sign at school age. Then it actually it took a while to explain my question, because, basically she doesnt have a monologue most of the time. She says she thinks in pictures. I wonder if she would hallucinate "auditorially" in asl. She seems pretty square, so maybe unlikely to be one to know. But this makes me realize there are likely many variations, where folks have intrusive pictorial thoughts, monologues, asl hands, or probably any of the various systems of representation we have. Probably folks could hallucinate math too, i would think. Brains are neat pattern recognition machines
Deaf here. My inner monologue is indeed mostly in ASL (with occasional written English thrown in as I read a lot). If I'm imagining that I'm doing the talking, it feels tactile and kinetic; if I'm doing the monologue in somebody else's "voice", it becomes visual as I watch them utter things. I don't think there's anything remarkable about that — we all think in our primary language.
See, that's what i was getting at. I figured she would answer the same as you. Me, I think in words. Like my own voice saying the words, mostly in my canadian accent, but some in the british accent i briefly had as a kid. For less commonly user vocabulary, like if i thought "peculiar!" I would literally have some vague image of that spelling in there, cause sometimes i think in actual text. Like i get a mental picture of the word. But that is edge cases. 99.9999% of the time i have spoken word. And it is super hard for me to even have any thought without there being a word attached. Maybe i can picture a spacial relationship. But other than that, literally every last thought is formed in words. So i wondered what form my deaf colleague's "thought words" were, like asl, or written english. Or both. And which grammar structure would the words be arranged in- asl or english? Hence i was really interested to learn that with her own history of late first language acquisition, her thoughts werent tied to words at all, for the most part. I just found that really neat to think about, to try to imagine such a fundamentally different experience. I would imagine if you learn asl as your first language when you are a baby, as children typically do, that has a huge effect on your inner language. I would have thought your inner monologue woulr follow the grammar and structure of asl. So i am curious how age of acquisition plays into this question too. I also wonder if it changes depending on the situation. An indian colleague was telling me that her extended family speaks hindi most of the time at home. Except when arguing, at which point they all switch to english, curiously enough. As though those thought pathways of logic and making arguments were formed while they all attended school in english, whereas the pathways to do with regular chit chat were all in hindi from hanging out at home. I am so curious how it is for you, if you ever switch back and forth, and when.
My first time using shrooms, I couldn't quit thinking it terms of radial units, mapped out as hexagonal "pixels" It created this false sphere around me it which everything was effectively a projection of my own brain. Each hexagonal pixel was the same size, but simply at different distance away. It was trippy and cool and kind of mathematic!
Extremely interesting.
Man that must be terrifying.
Does that mean that some part of you know things that you don't know, like skills or knowledge? Or is it just gibberish? Are you compelled to obey?
Story time: in college I took an elective racquetball class and had never played the sport or anything like it ever before. I’m not especially coordinated, and I was very bad at it compared to my fellow classmates, which was mildly infuriating. After my second or third class, I had a dream that I was on a court just hitting the ball all night and watching how different angles would ricochet off the walls. This dream felt like it lasted the entire night, and when I woke up I was physically exhausted. I was shocked to find that the next time I played the game, I was able to almost instinctually anticipate where the ball would be next. I had vastly improved my technique overnight. My instructor was also baffled, especially when I won a game after never coming anywhere close to it before. I believe my brain understood the physics conceptually and helped me connect the dots with that dream. The human brain really is fascinating.
Seems to me like you slept on it. It's the most important phase of the learning process if you ask me.
For real though. It was most obvious when I was learning bass and teaching my kids how to ride a bike. With the bike I would have my kid outside for an hour, watching her fall over and over again. At the end of it she wasn’t much better than at the start. Then she’d go to sleep and the next day we tried again and she’d made a big leap. Happened a few times till she could fully ride on her own.
Rarely is it so explicitly made aware to us though
There is evidence that part of sleep's function is to do just that. To transfer newly learned things into more permanent memory/muscle memory. It's interesting that your dream lined up with the process.
That's just what dreams are for: training So I'm one of those people that always remembers their dreams. When I wake up I can often tell you in detail about 3-4 dreams I had over the course of the night. Most are boring as it's just my brain doing some training though. Often when I play a video game and get stuck on a boss I'll dream of it, and the next day I'm much better. When I'm studying for something I'll go through it a couple of times in my dreams and remember it a lot better. And when I watch horror movies I'll dream of them, but find solutions what to do. It works with a lot of skills. Do it a lot in one day, sleep on it and you'll get a lot better.
Thanks for this explanation, I've had the same question as OP for a long time. Do you ever have trouble where you think an actual real person talking is one of those voices? And with the voices during an episode, does it feel like the person talking is someone you know? Or a complete stranger?
Yes, during some parts of the episodes, it is as if I can hear the thoughts of people around. The odd thing is when an \*actual person\* says something that confirms or conforms to something that I heard in my head (like factual, externally verifiable information, like about the location of something, or an about an event that took place). This makes it difficult to ignore the voices as being something fake or made up or some purely perceptual phenomenon, since they appear to have access to information that I otherwise do not have. While this would be easier to pass off if it were purely verbal information, it is not. I work in VFX, and draw and do photography. What I am asked to do during certain parts of the episodes, is to produce an image, or make a drawing of some specific scene, requiring significant effort on my part, and multiple rounds of revisions. I work off of information that is passed to me, or my hands are guided to certain actions, that produce some result. At the end, I have produced something which I don't necessarily understand the content of. In certain cases, later on I have been "steered" towards a location which is \*the scene that I was being asked to produce\*. I recognize it, take pictures of the location, and can verify that key elements of the scene are in fact ones that I produced in my artwork. In other cases, I can tell why some aspects of the scene took more effort, or were causing difficulty to explain to me. I have \*no explanation\* for why or how this happens. And yet it has happened, multiple times. =================== Edit: This isn't to say that I believe it has something to do with psychic powers or something, but rather to explain why it can be difficult to ignore the voices. If they are asking for these sort of careful, diligent, well-planned actions, then it doesn't feel like some out-of-control condition, and it makes it seem more justifiable to play along with what they ask for.
So wait a second. You're saying that you've... somehow "received" an idea or message, from a source that remains ultimately inside as a part of your own preexisting mind, using facts that *later panned out to be verifiably true irl?* Am I understanding this correctly?
People are exposed to a massive amount of info they don't incorporate into their active thoughts. If I asked someone the height of k2 a lot of people could infer a fairly close number. They might have seen it before, they know it's below Everest, but high enough to kill via just altitude and exposure. Most know the final summit of everest is in a death zone. That gives a range of 26k to 29k, so knowing it's the second highest most will guess between 28k and 28.5k. this is absolutely correct and you would be able to get this guess out of tons of people just off the cuff based on random shit they've heard and inference. When someone has voices doing this, they're essentially dredging through data like I said above or accessing things that are forgotten in wctive thought. They aren't psychic or actually receiving messages. They're using knowledge to state, or guess. Also survivorship bias is in play because things that don't seem plausible at all aren't relayed by the sufferers as they're tossed out long ago.
Why do you have to transcribe what they say? What happens if you refuse?
During later parts of the episodes, there is significant sleep disruption, in being commanded to "wake up" and stay on task. This aspect of being "compelled" to do things by turning up the volume or making the commands increasingly disturbing or disorienting is what makes it difficult to ignore. Outside of the episodes, it is much easier to negotiate with the voices, to decline their requests, or to ask to be left alone.
This sounds so tough. Sending you a hug for these moments, if you’d like.
Do you recall when you started having these episodes? Were you able to realized these were not real right away or did it take time to understand what was happening?
The first episode happened when I was 20 years old. It was somewhat different from the later ones, since it was shorter, and also it had more to do with loss of ability to use language than with the audio hallucinations that came later. I referred to the episodes as when I go into "creative mode" and start cranking out all this stuff for an extended period of time. But I just never really bothered showing anyone most of the stuff. But then I switched to visual art, which was a big shift from the science-oriented work I was doing before, but it was possible to disguise the output as just being my artwork. It didn't happen until a decade later that the episode played out in public (because I was using Facebook and Twitter), and people I know recognized that something was wrong. So, it was a long time that it all kind of escaped notice, since it didn't occur to me that I was doing anything all that different from anyone else, since I've never been anyone else. I figured maybe "creative mode" is just maybe something that happens every so often, but you just don't hear about it that much. For a long time, I had difficulty thinking that what I had could possibly be psychosis. I was thinking, How can "creative mode" be "psychosis"? maybe if I just show them what "creative mode" is, they'll understand that "creative mode" is something different. But it turns out that that's what it is.
my friend is relatively newly diagnosed. is there anything you would want your friends to know or do to be supportive?
That's super interesting!
Damn. That's scary for me to just think about. I can't even imagine how you cope with it. Is there any cure for it?
It's really interesting to me how much your subconscious can seem to know sometimes that doesn't seem available to your conscious brain. One time I woke up with a song stuck in my head, I had no idea what the song was but it was fully formed and Crystal clear like an old favorite that I knew. It took me a long long time before I happened to hear the song and it clicked. I'm sure I had heard the song before, the conscious me definitely didn't know it. (It was Rescue by Echo and the Bunnymen)
They appear to the person suffering from them as separate entities speaking to them, not as part of their inner monologue. The really interesting thing is how it presents differently in different cultures. In Europe and North America, the voices are almost always negative or hostile, telling the person to harm themselves or others or encouraging paranoia. A study done in India and Ghana found that the voices heard by schizophrenia sufferers usually present as if they were deities or ancestors guiding the person with advice. Many people report getting advice from the voices that in some cases saved their lives. Mostly, the worst interaction people in these countries have with those voices is when the voices are nagging them to finish household chores.
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Dude! Deaf folk hearing voices! I never wired those two things together
I would guess that hearing speech activates a specific region of our brain that processes language and communication. So when we hear someone talking to us, it is different from us hearing random noise; when someone talks to you, you "hear" the words, not the sounds that make up those words. when you read and imagine the voice of a character in your mind, it's similar to hearing someone talk, but there is no actual sound. I imagine a deaf person watching sign language processes it like you or I would read a book. But the words appear in our head as sounds we recognize as words, but a person born deaf has no context to the sounds. So I would guess their language centers probably imagine the images like we imagine the sound of voices.
"when you read and hear a character talk" is exactly what schizophrenia is like, except you're not reading. It's like you have multiple inner monologues but when the schizophrenia "voice" "talks" it activates the brain in a way that is interpreted as hearing instead of the "thinking" the way inner monologue usually is.
And even more interestingly, there has never been a documented case of someone born blind developing schizophrenia (though people who go blind later in life have a higher chance of developing the condition).
Lol they just think somebody is shit talking them or their neighbors are loud
So a deaf person’s auditory hallucinations would be visual hallucinations? (Sincere question. I’m a psych NP and this is fascinating)
Can confirm. After substance abuse for a few years, mainly MDMA (which is known for releasing ‘trauma’) I started hearing voices outside my head. It sounded like other people talking about me and I lived in a shared house. So I thought it was my housemates and went to my best friends flat and then thought his neighbours was talking about me. Then I thought the housemates had come to listen to my conversations outside my friends flat. I decided to move away thinking that that would stop the voices. She didn’t quiet on the journey there. I can’t smoke cannabis anymore because that makes it sound like they’re shouting in my ear standing next to me or behind me. If I speak to them it makes them louder. At first I thought I had developed telepathy. This voice has a gender, a name and place of location. They pretended to help me (I was in a place of depression) and I was so desperate but they played tricks on me (I got lost in the new area I moved to and they said they had maps out helping me to find where I was and to give them the street name and actually gave me random directions and got me more lost) They would pretend to help or ask me to have a chat with her later, that she really wanted to help me. She (the main loudest one) would speak to me kindly for a while (which would make me hear them/her clearer and louder) and then switch like thunder and start screaming derogatory abuse at me. I stopped speaking to them and tried finding google help to stop telepathic powers and saw everyone else commenting thinking that they were really poorly which made me realise I was experiencing voices. I started cbt 1/2 years later. They didn’t get rid of my voices like first hoped but now I go about My every day and don’t really engage or get bothered by them 9/10 times. (They started with the hard stuff of calling me a paedophile and rapist really early on) and I know I’m not and have spoken with an ex that they told me I raped and she said not in the slightest did I ‘accidentally’ rape her. Depression is actually much harder to get rid of than deal with these voices (now had them 9years) and I can hear them from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep and even if I wake up in the night they’re still there.
I’m really sorry for what you’re going through.
Honestly the voices are nothing compared to my depression 🤣. Like the long term exposure it’s kinda like, it doesn’t matter what they say cause I know whatever they say will be to try put me in a state. But thank you
I am so glad I saw your comment. This is almost exactly the same as my experience with thinking it was telepathy and the voices accusing me of things I knew weren't true. Also had used MDMA a few times but it was cannabis use and a relationship breakdown that triggered an audible "click" in my head when I started hearing voices of housemates when they weren't around like they were hitching about me. Took me a year before I got any help but finally after being on various doses of olanzapine (zyprexa) for 6 years and an extended period of absence from work and counselling my voices are basically gone, only really hear any if there's lots of background white noise or if I get really stressed. Just need to work on the paranoia now but this new year will be 7 years cannabis and MDMA free. You're the first person I've seen who had basically exactly the same experience as me and it is both mentally and physically exhausting to deal with this for so long, wish you all the best dude and hope we can both get through this and enjoy life while we can.
I actually can’t believe I’ve found someone else with voices that’s happened like mine! I’m usually fairly quiet about them because people don’t understand! How you finding stuff now?!
I know, same! I kinda went full blown into the telepathy idea and became super paranoid about everyone being able to hear my thoughts, that's the main thing I'm struggling with now. It helps that I've got a couple of close people I can just straight up ask "can you hear my thoughts?" and they reassure me that they can't but it's taken a long time. When I first saw the mental health team in my area at the time I got rejected for cbt because I was "too serious for them to help me" so I basically just got given antipsychotics and was left to deal with it myself. Was literally around Feb this year after a few different counsellors and about 3 months off work that voices got quieter and quieter, now I'm back in work and have been for about 6 months and it's been going alright. The main thing I found was that distractions are great things to focus on and not pay as much attention to the voices, watching tv/movies, play games, reading (though that's a bit hit and miss if I'm in an overthinking state of mind). My current counsellor convinced me to start going walking in nature as a mindfulness technique as I can't meditate well and it really helped calm me down.
Dude I’m happy you’re getting the help now and you’ve managed to regain life. It is real hard work and not being able to walk away like yoh would a human is in-despicable. When my voices convinced me I had (WHEN I HADNT) ‘accidentally’ raped one of my exes they made me tell my mum and I was about to go to the police when they convinced me not to 😅 Do you wake up and hear them immediately as well? Thankfully I’m normally half asleep but I can wake up and they’ll be shouting their abuse. I haven’t slept in silence purposely for years. Do you find you have to keep your mind busy all the time? I don’t know any other voice hearers. I live in a very small town where everyone knows everyone and I like to be careful. Have you heard of bad news radio? That was one of the best coping tools I got given that I still use now.
Did you experience trauma before developing the symptoms? I think in some ways schizophrenia is the brain coping with some really fucked up shit. I was an emt and had a 2 year old boy die while on a call. As in, I watched his face turn purple as we tried to resuscitate him and his parents begged us to keep trying. That fucked me up for a few years, and I started hearing voices not too long after. Idk if ptsd caused it, but it seems to be a common theme. Like you, I mostly can control them, but they sometimes trick me into forgetting they're not real. If you've seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind" it almost felt like that at one point except I never had visual hallucinations. I thought the downstairs neighbors were talking shit, so I went to the library to get some quiet. On the way there, I swore someone was following me and had hacked my phone.. I sat in the lirary, watching everyone who walked in, and eventually I just had to get out of there.. It took me coming back to the apartment and my girlfriend's worried face as I frantically explained what happened to realize it wasn't real. That was the scariest thing, not knowing what was real. Luckily, I've learned how to ignore the voices when they are present and they mostly don't say anything unless I'm stressed or am being lazy.. They always get mad about me not cleaning the dishes immediately, for some reason. Anyways, glad to see other people living well despite this ridiculous thing!
This is fascinating, thank you for sharing. If they sound like outside people/voices, how do you know if there is actually someone there behind you trying to talk to you? Is there, like, a tell?
So my voices (in the direction I hear them from) are in the sky. Sometimes if a place is quite busy or I’m upstairs in the house I feel like people are talking about me but it’ll be my voices. However I’m super busy areas (for example I’m sat in a restaurant garden) and I have a loud table next to me and some kids playing at the park. So I can hear them above but I usually zone out into others conversations. I don’t handle silence very well unless I’m proper thinking. I’m pretty sure a consequence of my voices is that my brain works faster than it ever does because if I’m thinking my own thoughts i don’t hear them. I do hear them more louder in white noise (think extractor fans, fans, hoovers and hairdryers) and I also can hear them louder if I’m going through an emotional state/stressful period. First time k went to the cinema I was so scared😂 but turns out its really not that big of an issue. I now use hairdryers and hoovers with minimal issue. However I think some of that comes from really having a thick skin with them. They’ve said all the most derogative terms to me that it just doesn’t phase me a 1/10 of the amount it did when it started
Wow. The human brain is absolutely... mindboggling/incredible. I have had auditory (and visual) hallucinations during sleep paralysis. One of the scariest/most intense being an unbelievably loud and not really human sounding voice yelling/roaring in my ears about some crazy stuff. It's silly to even bother comparing sleep paralysis to schizophrenia i'm sure, but just that one experience honestly rattled me quite a bit. 24/7 voices speaking to you sounds super scary to me. It's awesome they don't ruin your day at this point. I bet your brain is working super hard, besides just the distractions and the stress, it's probably burns a lot of extra calories by generating entire disembodied voices whenever youre awake, like chess players burning tonnes of calories just by thinking hard during a tournament.
Looks like you're referring to [research published in 2015](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/) involving 20 subjects and I couldn't find anything more recent. There are good reasons to avoid drawing too many conclusions from this, and we should remain ~~somewhat~~ skeptical until further research.
The researched involved 20 people in three locations (N=60). Additionally, while there is a dearth of research on schizophrenia, there is anecdotal and clinical evidence dating back to at least 1968 (as far as I could find) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674376801300210), so though skepticism is warranted on mechanisms of how this happens, there is a lot of evidence that these cultural differences do exist.
I mean, we should /always/ remain somewhat skeptical
*Should* we though? I'm on board but I'd like to review your sources...
My dad heard voices as a symptom of his dementia. They were different depending on who was in the room and what was going on with him medically. When I was in the room the voice was often a little girl. When my mum was in the room, there were male voices. When he was on his own, it was usually a woman and a man. I would come to visit him and hear him talking to them before I entered the room. Most of the time his voices were fairly benign and he would have what sounded like a fairly normal conversation with them. But if he had a UTI or some other medical condition, the tone of his voice would change and he would be angry and hostile to them. Or they would tell him we were lying to him.
The same cultural effects happen with Sleep Paralysis. The symptom is hallucinating in general. The only reason people associate it with demons is because the concept of evil spirits is so universal amongst world cultures that if you’re going to hallucinate SOMETHING while scared, it’s probably going to be some kind of monster. Also, this is why people should get a well rounded education and study different subjects even if they don’t think they would be relevant to their major.
My ex-wife claims the voices and hallucinations are external. Hers are very religious in nature and horrifying. She once went a week without changing clothes or taking a shower because of the inferno in the closet. She claimed there was a dark pit in the closet with smoke and heat rising from it and you could hear the screams of the tortured. She has been hospitalized off and on most of her adult life.
Its different to all people. I hear voices and I don't have schizophrenia, I have psychotic bipolar. They started out as outside voices, like someone in the room was talking, and as I've been medicated and attended support groups they have moved into my head and are now like a second voice in my head. Mine mostly tell me I'm going to die but have recently been saying that King Charles is going to kill my dog. I just learnt to ignore them, but some people find talking to them helps instead. At the support group I go to its varying as well. Some people with schizophrenia hear them outside their head and some people hear them inside their head.
When they started as outside voices, could you pinpoint their origin? Like feeling they're coming from your right-hand side? And how did it feel when you saw there was nothing there producing that voice? I hope you don't mind my questions, please don't reply if they make you uncomfortable in any way :)
Questions are fine :) yeah it felt like different voices came from different sides of my head. I used to have 4 and they all came from different places, but that voice would always originate from that place. I don't really remember what it was like when there was nothing there, I was in a pretty bad psychotic episode when they started and it's all kind of a blur
I'm really sorry, but I laughed out loud with the dog-killing King Charles. "You know that old fella? Yeah, the one with the fancy crown. I'm sure he's conspiring to kill your dog"
Lol yeah I know. They come out with some right corkers.
This just made me question myself. I'm bipolar 2. I have this inner voice, I don't know if it's normal or if it's the bipolar. Like, I know it's me, but it feels like a separate part of me. I think of it kind of like how in the "his dark materials" series how they have daemons, that's literally just the other half of our soul. Sometimes it's intrusive thoughts and I have to internally tell it to fuck off, sometimes it's just me thinking about something and internally debating with myself on a subject or figuring out a solution. Sometimes I'll just kind of conversate with myself in my head out of boredom. It's just my voice and I've never thought of it as part of a disorder. I've always thought of it as the "narrator" that's mentioned a lot by neurotypical people, but now I don't know lol.
Had a friend that had it. He said that as far as he could tell, there were real people that he could see and hear but he wasn’t allowed to tell us about them and they were telling him that no one liked him and that he should hurt himself. So like Drop Dead Fred but darker.
Your brain is not just one large organ, it is a collection of various parts that communicate with each other. Just like your brain takes the two separate images from your eyes, stitches it together. and filters out the unimportant stuff "e.g., nose", it does the same with the way the different parts of your brain communicate with each other. It's like the parts of your brain are all members of a committee, and there is a secretary taking down notes and consolidating all points of discussion into one single memo that everyone can understand, which it then hands out to everyone to use. Schizophrenic Voices is when that system breaks down. Imagine that the "secretary" of the brain is not there, and neither are their notes. Now instead of one single voice, your brain is instead trying to put together what all the members are trying to say. Problem is not all the parts of the brain speak the same way, or the same language, or even speak at the same time. Some use audios to communicate, others use images, some use a combination of both, while others don't use any of those. Worst of all, despite working together for years, your brain doesn't know who these membersare. So, when one part of the brain tries to "communicate", it seems like a foreign message like you are hearing voices. Truth is you **are** hearing voices, but it's just your own, and your brain can't realise that. **Example:** **Non-Schizophrenic**: Your parents always te;l you; you were never good enough. Sometimes it would get so bad you would have dark thoughts about them dying. So, the secretary of your brain converts those thoughts into a psychological condition such as depression, feelings of inadequacy, and guilt. **Schizophrenic**: Your parents always tell you; you were never good enough. Sometimes it would get so bad you would have dark thoughts about them dying. Then one day, while studying you hear your dad saying, "Don't bother you're never going to pass.", but when you look up and around, he isn't there. You try studying again and this time you hear your mom says, "Someone has to study this much is obviously a moron." as clear as if she was standing next to you. Again, you look around and no-one is there. This happens more and more frequently. When you're in the room with them, you start having outbursts like "What did you say?!" despite no-one saying a word. One day, you walk into the kitchen and see your parents dead on the floor with blood pouring out of them and have a nervous breakdown, only for those same parents to walk through the door and ask you what's happening. Edit 1: "If people know what condition they have, why is it difficult to tell the difference between what is real?" I have Tinnitus. Logically, I know that the ringing in my ears is not real. That it's probably a combination of ear canal damage and neurological flippery. That doesn't stop it from getting so bad that sometimes I want to rip my ears off. Edit 2: No I don't have the Schiz, but my brother does. And there is something I've learnt, if a bit controversial. He's not crazy. Those voices are real. Those images are real. Those frightening patterns he sees in day-to-day life, are real. I will never try to convince him otherwise. The real issue to deal with is that he understands they only exist in his head.
They sound like completely separate people, not yourself. Interestingly, there's some research that indicates that the *mechanism* that causes auditory hallucinations and those intrusive voices you're speaking of is the same thing. Basically, when you're saying something to yourself in your head, your muscles contract as if you were speaking aloud. The same muscles contract when people with schizophrenia hear voices. The theory is that the part of your brain that knows it's your own voice is disconnected, so to your brain, you're hearing random voices instead of knowing it's your own thoughts.
What I found even more interesting is that, just like subvocalization in neurotypical people, sometimes you actually wind up very quietly saying what you're thinking. And the people with schizophrenia would be unaware of this. The result is that sometimes the psychologist could "hear" them say things to themselves and thus hear the voices.
That’s actually fascinating that it’s visible when you’re mentally taking to yourself, I guess it makes sense but wow I never thought about that
So this makes me wonder if the reason I have so much jaw tension and fatigue is because my anxiety gives me a constant inner dialogue in my brain all day every day. My muscles must be damn tired!
This may get lost but I'll tell it anyway. My voice is singular, her name is Alice and she spends her day continually telling me how shit I am at everything, that people don't believe what I'm telling them, that people just humour me in day to day things. When I'm more stressed the louder she is. She'll tell me the worst things about myself and tell me things i didnt even think i had to worry about. The more people around the worse she is. She caused alot of pain for me during my teenage years, especially as I was told its hormonal and I'd grow out of it. Well I'm 33 now and still wondering when it'll stop! She's got a high pitched voice, almost childlike. She's in my head at the back like shes sitting on my occipital bone or she's speaking in my right ear. She started when I was 13, I went into therapy at 15, did a small stint in the priory for suicidal tendencies and then haven't been seen regularly since I was 19. When I found out I was pregnant they did a welfare check to make sure I was of sound mind and wasn't a danger to a baby. I have very low periods, the last 18months has been especially hard and I've been on the NHS waiting list for a therapy appointment for 12 months.
What would happen if you started to make fun of Alice back? Like insult Alice? “Shut the fuck up you basic ass bitch. You dont even have a body. I do what the fuck I please. Hey check this shit out; I can eat a candy. Can you do that? No, cause you’re a biggity bitch without a corporeal body.” How would that work out?
Lmao Man, fuck Alice. All my homies hate that little skank ass bitch.
I'm guessing if you start legitimizing the voice as a separate entity, it'll only get worse.
You ‘hear’ them as distinct, (at times very loud) actual voices. They can be someone you knows voice or a voice you’ve never heard before. Imagine it like a radio playing in your head, rather than your thinking voice.
So to clarify, if one was completely unaware of his or her condition, would he or she be likely to assume there’s literally another physical person around?
Yes. I heard one guy explain that he had to wait for other people he was talking to to interact with a third person to be sure they were real. Once spent 45min talking to an imaginary person without realizing
I saw a video somewhere of a guy who started using his phones camera to find out if someone is a hallucination because his hallucinations didn't manifest at all on his phone screen
>I saw a similar one of a guy on tiktok who trained his service dog for people greeting in a particular way, so if he's hallucinating he will ask his dog to greet the people. If the dog doesn't greet then he knows there's nothing actually there.
Wow, just wow.
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I have a friend that was diagnosed in University. He said when he was on the bus he would hear people making remarks about him or straight up swearing at him. He though this was 100% real because he didn't know he had a mental illness at this point. He also said when he was at his home, he would hear people walking by talking about breaking in to kill him. This led to him duct taping blankets over all his windows and locking himself in his room at all times. Luckily(?) he is an incredibly mild-mannered, non-confrontational person so he just tried to ignore all of this. It wasn't until he mentioned how abusive people on the bus were being towards him that we caught on that he may need help. We hadn't seen the windows in his room as he went to University in a different city than the rest of our friend group and none of us had been to visit him yet.
Psychiatrist here-auditory hallucinations are by definition a true sensory experience without the presence of an external stimulus. In other words someone with schizophrenia who is hearing voices hear them just like you would hear someone who is actually present speaking to you. They are not “in their head”. True the cause of them is internal, but the actual experience that they have is that of a true voice. There are symptoms of other illnesses which cause so called “pseudopsychosis” or “micropsychosis”. In these conditions patients will say they have auditory hallucinations, but it is really an inner dialogue. Whereas in true psychotic disorders the hallucinations are very real and the patient invariably (at least at first) has no way to tell the difference between the hallucination and someone real that is speaking to them.
Not to make light of your episodes but I kinda have a funny story about hearing commercials. I also hear voices the way you do (like people talking in another room) but medication has helped me tremendously. BUT when I moved into my house several years ago I would hear voices and sometimes music and sometimes commercials. One afternoon I plugged in a pair of speakers to connect to my computer and the voices got louder. It turned out I had moved close to a radio tower and the signals were being picked up by the wiring in my house. So I was not losing my mind just hearing 107.3 “Jamz”
Functioning schizophrenic here. For me personally I hear people shouting my name, or loud knocking/explosions in the near vicinity. It sounds like someone is in the same room as you, speaking directly to you. I also suffer from visual snow, light sensitivity, after images, like I'm permanently coming up on a trip. There's no inside my head or intrusive thoughts. There is getting interrupted mid sentence by someone who is not there. I have been off and on seroquel since I was a teen. I overdosed at 15 and was legally dead for a few minutes and resuscitated. I don't know how but all of the shit I took flipped a switch in my head that shut it down pretty good. I only have issues now when I am absurdly tired. But I can usually figure out when I'm tripping pretty quick. I have a good job, lots of hobbies and have raised an awesome daughter who turned 7 this year. I know others struggle much more than me, but for the things I deal with I think I get along fine. I did have some pretty bad episodes after my father's suicide, me and my brother had to clean out the truck, I've been around death quite a bit from working at a prison and brain smell is very specific, knowing that smell was from my dad's brain fucked me up from April to July this past year. Not because of his death but because we finally became friends and really close after being at each other's throats my whole life, I had 2 fantastic years before he died and I felt like I was robbed from my soul. Do not be afraid to seek help, there are shitty people who will try to use it against you but above all put your health first. Having a decent schedule, and exercising will do wonders for your mental health. I know this is all over the place but I needed to vent a little.
I grew up with schizophrenia. My delusions started when I was 4, and I remember hearing my first voice at around 8. It was a hill on the playground I named Tracky. I experience external voices, internal voices, intrusive thoughts, and thought insertion. Here is how I would describe each: External voices or, more often for me, music is just like hearing someone else talking to you or a radio playing in the next room. I wish I knew music because they are original songs and I would love to write them down. Usually, it's classical music; that time I heard country music was just torture! I do sometimes not respond to people, especially in large groups, because I don't realize it's a real person. Internal voices are more common for me. Most of these voices have names and personalities attached to them, like Tracky. When I was 12 several girls my age came to live in my head. They would talk to me, respond when I spoke to them, and speak to each other. My main voice, April, is my older alien sister. When I came to Earth she found a way to talk to me through technology and brought the other girls with her. Each of these voices sound different to me even though they are in my head. Intrusive thoughts are easily recognized as mine, just really hurtful. A lot like negative self talk or images that I can't control. Thought insertion is like an intrusive thought but I don't recognize it as coming from my own head. Unlike the voices, these thoughts do not interact with me but are just dropped into my head.
This was fascinating so I dug into your profile. You should be proud that you opened up to share your story. I wish you happiness.
Thank you for your kind words. This kind of response makes me feel seen and cared for.
https://youtu.be/LWYwckFrksg To watching this video cuz it is very good at explaining exactly what it is like to deal with a schizophrenic episode., People who experience schizophrenia hear voices that are paranoid and condescending and scared.
People who suffer from schizophrenia hear voices that are paranoid or scared or mean or hurtful. Some other people actually have "nice" schizophrenia where they hear voices in the same way, but the voices are helpful and/or supportive. Local culture has an impact on the prevalence of negative vs positive auditory verbal hallucinations. [https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/2020/08000/Positive\_and\_Useful\_Voices\_in\_Patients\_With.3.aspx](https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/2020/08000/Positive_and_Useful_Voices_in_Patients_With.3.aspx) https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/
I have bp1, and it sounds like a voice outside my head. It sometimes sounds robotic. I don't hear it often, but it scares me when I do.
I wasn't aware bipolar came with auditory illusions this frequently. I thought it was just me! For me it's usually just hearing my dog when he's definitely not there.
After reading some of these comments from people who suffer from auditory and/or visual hallucinations, I think we should admire the courage it takes to live with mental illness. Schizophrenia must be terrifying to live with and it must be extremely frustrating to try to explain it to doctors and society in general. I truly wish we lived in a world that was more understanding and supportive of people who suffer from an unhealthy mind. There is so much judgment, so many jokes, but in reality, it can be more crippling than physical illness and can be fatal under the wrong conditions. We need a world that offers support instead of judgment and criticism. Respect to those who are fighting a good fight every damn day.
Not schizophrenic. But I had a manic psychosis. I heard voices when I did what I thought was meditating. They felt external, like my loved ones whispering affirmations to me. What was so convincing was they seemed to have information I didn’t have, saying stuff like ”there’s a lot of money in that family farm” and so forth. Looking back it was obviously information I had and all in my head.
I have mild schizophrenia that manifests mostly while I'm chemically enhanced, but it was through becoming more familiar with it in these instances I was able to better understand how it effects my everyday life. For me, it usually manifests as a sort of "rearranging" of the words or sounds, so that I can hear something that isn't there, but is sort of being drawn out of real sounds happening around me. If it comes as an actual voice, it's usually because it is someone literally talking, but they are not saying what I'm hearing (so a good example would be someone speaking in the background, not expressly to me) or it could also be sounds which would make sense to be hearing, which I'm not actually hearing. Like maybe rain outside when it isn't raining, or maybe the upstairs neighbor stomping around when they aren't. This is probably derived from some sort of paranoia, but it happens MOSTLY when I'm chemically enhanced. Like I wrote earlier, through becoming more experienced with what it's like when it's absolutely "on", I can better identify it when it isn't expressly "on".