I attended a Hearing Voices workshop yesterday. Not as a therapist but as a client – ‘client’ being the operative term used to describe those receiving psychiatric treatment in New Zealand. The Hearing Voices Network is a network of support groups for people who experience ‘auditory hallucinations’, and is an approach to mental health care only recently experimented with in New Zealand.
Voice Hearing is the label for the experience of thoughts occurring that seemingly cannot have originated in the ego; they feel as though they have been received from outside the Self. In psychiatric practice, Voice Hearing is considered a symptom of major mental illness, such as psychosis or full-blown schizophrenia, and the Psychiatrists attempt to medicate it away with tranquillisers such as Respiridone and Olanzapine (both of which I’ve been on). However, between 4 and 10% of the population ‘hear voices’ apparently – of whom less than a quarter end up in the aegis of the mental health services. This suggests that it is about time that Voice Hearing be re-evaluated.
Of course, in talking about this I’ve implicitly admitted that I hear (or at least have heard) disembodied voices. My voices are unusual because they all belong to real, living people. Apparently, people who hear voices can vividly remember their first experience, so I thought I would describe mine.
I was in the bath thinking about the Theory of Relativity… I should say that in the preceding months I had found maths a good way of distracting myself from persistent feelings of anxiety and paranoia. I’d set out to write a derivation of the E=MC2 , succeeded and then forgotten it. I was lying in the bath, trying to re-prove from the beginning and having trouble when a voice suddenly intruded and said (in a distinctive Texan drawl) “DO YOU WANT GEORGE W.BUSH TO HELP YOU?”. Naturally, I was a bit startled.
I asked him, “Do you believe in God?” (I was toying with theism at the time). “Mitochlorians,” he replied. Later, like any good liberal, I asked him for the real reasons for the war in Iraq, hoping he’d spill something about Halliburton or something but only elicited some balderdash about the Clash of Civilisations.
I hardly hear any voices now (at the present, I should say). However one did pop up yesterday to say that I should really have named the blog “The deranged ramblings of a crazed psychotic”. I dunno. It’d make a better title than “Persiflage”.