Hearing voices

[paigetheoracle]

Are voices in the head psychotic or inspirational? How can we tell and how do we handle such phenomena? Psychiatry in the past was labelled them psychotic and tried to silence them as artists and the spiritual have used them as guides and labelled them divine. If benign then why try to drug them out of existance? If helpful to the personality, even worse. The church used to treat them as demons to be exorcised as primitive man saw them as Gods to be worshipped. Personally, the way I see it, is that they are all trying to get our attention and like physical people in the outside world, we should try to determine their motives (test the spirits): A thug with a knife in their hand being egged on by his mates to stab someone is no different in my opinion than a psychotic with a knife being egged on to stab someone by his voices. The benign or helpful should be integrated into the full personality and the vicious should be approached as a separate personality needing psychotherapy to discover the cause of their split from reality, to reintegrate them into the body in much the same way as society tries to reintegrate a criminal (Look for the trauma that led to the distrust of other people and get them to see that it is possible to trust again).

[UncleAl]

Are voices in the head psychotic or inspirational?

Psychotic. Now, are they also entertaining or useful? Everything and its opposite are both true in sociology. Encourage what you want and crush what you oppose. If you subsidze what you loathe by parasitizing what you desire, you get America.

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by paigetheoracle

Are voices in the head psychotic or inspirational?...

They could be a pathology [that's the word you were looking for] if they are continuous, convincing or interfere with daily life in any way.

On the other hand, they CAN be a normal functioning of a normal brain.

We have a structure on ONE side of the brain that handles listening and converts incoming mouth sounds into mentally recognized "speech". In other words, it converts the ears' blah-blah into recognizable words with meaning.

However, we have TWO of those speech centers--the second one is on the other side of the brain, and typically plays no part in speech recognition.

But every now and then... the second one will translate "something" into a recognizable string of speech--and when this happens, YOU HEAR A VOICE. It is often the voice of someone you know, typically a parent. And it typically says just a few words, often no more than your name, perhaps. On rare occassions, it may be a short command.

Now, what distinguishes this "inner voice" from a heard voice? The biggest thing is that since you are not actually hearing sound waves with both ears, the "location" function of your aural processes places this "inner voice" squarely inside the brain itself, rather than somewhere external to you.

I have "heard a voice" perhaps half a dozen times in my life. On average, once a decade, so this is NOT a serious pathology. I have always recognized that the voice was an artifact of my own brain. Almost always, I heard it as I was awakening from sleep, and when I heard it, it woke me fully up in an instant, often with side affects such as racing heart.

As far as I can remember, there were two occassions when the voice was my father's and both times it barked out my first name. Once it was my mother's voice and it said "honey?". Once it occurred at the end of a meaningful dream, and I woke up as the lead female character in the dream turned to me and shouted, "You must become aware!" On another occassion, the voice was of no one in particular and simply said the word, "Contrary!"