Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia to respect their voices and to treat their voices as persons, says Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, whose research seeks to understand th
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In her research, Ann Taves, Ph.D., professor of Religious Studies at The University of California at Santa Barbara, explores non-ordinary experiences and the way different disciplines might diagnose the same experience, such as hallucinating, from different perspectives—including psychology, psychiatry, religion, or spirituality. For example, while psychiatrists largely look at hallucinations as symptoms of pathology, many religious and spiritual movements are based on those exact same kinds of
Auditory hallucination is common according to Daniel B. Smith. In “Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?”, Peter D. Kramer’s summary of Smith’s 2007 book, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination (Penguin Press), Kramer summarizes Smith’s data. Though many of us in the mainstream associate hearing voices with pathology, 39 percent of healthy volunteers said they had heard their own thoughts aloud. Another 13 percent of those who had
