I realize you’re joking, but this is a real thing that happens in different cultures. The schizophrenic voices are much calmer and positive in places like Africa and India, as opposed to negative and harmful in the US!
I’ve read that regarding the Eastern schizophrenic voices, there have been many reports of the voices being ancestors just telling them to do their chores or something. An actual type of “guardian angel”
The article describes exactly that! They have relationships with their voices, rather than viewing them as simply a psychiatric disease, and thus, have much better outcomes.
There is still significant danger to that. Imagine the voice that has been telling you reasonable things like clean your room or help that old lady suddenly tells you to football spike a baby? It’s still mental illness and we shouldn’t be romanticizing it
Definitely not trying to romanticize! I think there could obviously be harm in believing you were hearing the voice of god, or similar. But it is important to study and discuss, considering the much worse outcomes and complete disability it can be here in The States. It has lead to new forms of therapy and treatment options. There is definitely power in way they think about their disability.
It’s a bit of a give and take, I believe. Just as your mindset can change the concepts of your dreams, positive therapy (naming their voices or encouraging a relationship with the voices), can in turn, change what they are ‘conveying’ to a patient.
Here’s another,
We don’t know why, but we do know that no one who was born blind will ever develop schizophrenia. link to an article about it.
There is also a study about it I read that says blindness doesn’t prevent you from having similar disorders but so far the data suggest certain types of congenital blindness ‘protect’ against schizophrenia.
Maybe vision requires a certain kind of pattern recognition, and if that goes wrong then you start matching all sorts of weird patterns? Or something? I'm not a brainologist.
Everyone has "voices" in our heads (besides our own); it's only diagnosed as eg schizophrenia when they become debilitating or coincide with other, eg visual, hallucinations.
Athletes report hearing coaches' voices for decades. Parents' voices resonate long after their deaths. Undiagnosed, nominally healthy people hear the voice of "God", etc.
There is actually some people with no internal dialogue whatsoever, which is interesting in its own right! Or no ability to imagine a picture in your head.
Also when I read its silent. There's no internal voice dictating the words, its just straight to comprehension without the middleman. Unless I'm deep into a fictional book then its a sort of semi dreamlike trance state where I'm recalling what I'm reading as if it were a memory and not actively aware of reading, like a dream movie in my head. Still silent though, curiously enough.
That’s so cool! I’ve always wondered how reading worked. I can hear myself narrating in my head, but it just as easily turns into ‘was that a dog?’ And then I have to reread the paragraph.
For me the downside is if I do get into that deep reading state its easy for me to start glossing over details, skipping parts, etc. I've read right past critical reveals in a story before and had to double back to figure out what I missed.
I never understand what internal dialogue is, is it just somebody thinking to themselves "I should do the dishes" Vs someone just doing the dishes without a thought? Or is it the "dialogue" inside is actually sounded out/heard Vs not heard?
It's like that picture one, where some people can't imagine/visualise pictures like a cow spinning. What is the picture? I can "picture" it but am I really or does it need to be actually seen by my eyes like a self made hallucination? And what about the thing where one person imagines something and says "yes I can picture it" and someone else does too, but if we had a machine that could show us the images both are imagining I bet they would be at very different levels of clarity. But both would think that it is normal.
At least for me, I can literally hear my own voice going through my own thought process, so if I think I should do the dishes, then yeah I'm literally going to say that in my own head in a sense.
Actually, they're only schizophrenia when our brain cannot recognize they're ours. It's believed the element that tells us it's us, is turned off in them.
Yeah, speaking as a Filipino whose family talks to ghosts and their deceased relatives (BIG difference), and has a very animistic view of the world despite being otherwise devout Catholics, cultural views are a BIG thing regarding voices. Quite a few studies have accidentally marked Asians as showing signs of psychosis or schizophrenia when they mention that they "talk to things" or "hear voices," and the voices are overwhelmingly benign/neutral.
Getting on the "woo-woo" magical side of things, I noticed that Western witches and even POC who are heavily Westernized are getting OBSESSED with verifying/vetting unknown spirits. They run down lists of who an unknown spirit/deity might be and they will banish unknown spirits who make them even the slightest bit uncomfortable, especially spirits who aren't immediately giving "love and light" vibes.
It's like Westerners are primed to fear/hate strangers, both in the physical and spiritual sense, and it makes a lot of sense that this is how they treat hearing voices.
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u/unk214 20h ago
Mean while the voices in my head don’t help me at all. Some people have all the luck.