ABSTRACT
New thinking about auditory hallucinations was prompted by a patient (Patsy Hage) who was able to voice her distress and challenge her psychiatrist (Dr Marius Romme), who listened and heard what she said (James, 2001: 31). She changed his life and the lives of countless others: the result was the Hearing Voices Network, established from 1987, by Dutch and British voice hearers and mental health workers (Romme and Escher, 1993). This self-help organisation has encouraged new thinking about the experience of hearing voices, resulting in research and the discovery of self-help and coping strategies. Patsy has since recovered and no longer hears voices (Voices, 2002; Hage, 2003: 3). Romme and his team in the Netherlands and Ivan Leudar at Manchester University (Leudar and Thomas, 2000) have discovered that two-thirds of people who hear voices cope well and do not need psychiatric care (Romme, 2001: 7). While Slade and Bentall (1988), Tien (1991), Eaton et al. (1991), Romme and Escher (1993), Watkins (1998) and Leudar and Thomas (2000) have shown that hearing voices is a human experience shared by many ‘normal’ people – about 2-3 per cent of the population according to Romme (2001) and 4-5 per cent according to Tien (1991) – only about 1 per cent are in receipt of psychiatric services. Thus hearing voices per se cannot now be regarded as necessarily a symptom of mental illness but a variety of human experience. People who hear voices are not all the same, indeed they are as heterogeneous as the general population. They are individuals and just as it is not very meaningful to suggest that all people who are gay are the same, so it is not helpful to think of people who hear voices as one class (Romme, 1998: 54). As already stated in Chapter 1, some people who hear voices have been great religious leaders and artists. Others are healers, actors, workers, children, deaf people, psychiatric patients and professionals. Hearing voices and other hallucinatory experiences are found across diagnostic categories and in the ‘normal’ population. Not all people who hear voices are psychotic. For some, voices are not problematic: voices can be helpful advisers as well as unhelpful persecutors.
