“What our research shows is that the voices exist. We must also accept that we cannot change the voices. They are not curable, just as you cannot cure left handed-ness or dyslexia, human variations are not open to cure – only to coping. Therefore, to assist people to cope, we should not give therapy that does not work. We should let people decide for themselves what helps or not. It takes time for people to accept that hearing voices is something that belongs to them.”

Professor Marius Romme

Professor Marius Romme MD PhD was Professor for Social Psychiatry at the Medical Faculty of the Univeisity of Maastricht (Netherlands) from 1974 to 1999, as well as consultant psychiatrist at the Community mental Health Centre in Maastricht.

He is now Visiting Professor at the Mental Health Policy Centre, University of Central England in Birmingham. He is best known for his work on hearing voices (auditory hallucinations) and is regarded as the founder and principle theorist for the Hearing Voices Movement.

Here is a nice description of his work:

Professor Romme is one of the most highly regarded psychiatrists working in Europe, unusually this respect lies as much with people who use psychiatric services as it does with fellow professionals European consumers respect him for his research regarding persons who hear voices and for his support of a specialised self-help group network. Romme’s research began after one of his patients who heard voices informed him that she was dissatisfied with what psychiatry offered her; psychiatry, she explained, could only provide her with a diagnosis and with behavior modification techniques – none of which helped to resolve her problems.

Rather than taking offense at the patient’s feedback, Romme opted to look further into the phenomena of hearing voices. Initially, his research took him back into history nearly 1,000 years – to a time when persons who heard voices were honored in their society or were considered to have attained an extraordinary state of consciousness. He began to realize that in the past people who heard voices were very capable of integrating into their communities and in many situations held honored roles in their societies. These historic attitudes stood in sharp contrast to the present day reality for persons who hear voices.

Romme’s research took on national importance in 1985 when a Dutch television program became interested in the phenomenon of hearing voices. During a prime time broadcast, a woman who heard voices was interviewed. As she described her personal experiences, she, too, stated that psychiatry had little or nothing to offer her to cope with hearing voices. Nearly 900 people in the Netherlands responded to the broadcast, and 400 of these people heard voices themselves, 350 of them had been hospitalized at least once, and 150 heard voices yet functioned productively in their community. Through additional research and a special conference, Romme discovered that many more people who heard voices were integrated successfully into society than had previously documented.

Taking into consideration the many voice-hearers who were living successfully in society and were not considered sick, Romme concluded that hearing voices need not be the direct cause of disability. Instead of the voices, Romme suggested that it was the overwhelming fear of not being able to control the voices that caused a person to become disabled. Furthermore, he posited that voice-hearers living in the community had learned to accept their condition, while those hospitalized battle vigorously, yet unsuccessfully, to suppress the voices. He suggested that it would be wiser to spend one’s energy learning how to accept and cope with the condition of hearing voices, rather than ignoring, resisting, or trying to suppress the voices. Indeed, he believed that struggling against the voices only causes them to become stronger. Romme further asserted that psychiatry’s attempts to eliminate voices by using various psychotropic medications, including neuroleptics, worked only in the short term.

In other words, while medications can never fully solve the problem, consumers themselves have the capacity to be selective when responding to voices, and many people can, in fact, come to ignore their voices altogether. Romme provided the example of a successful London businessman who heard voices and employed various coping techniques. Every evening, the businessman would designate one hour to sitting in a comfortable chair and allowing the voices to circulate through his mind, even responding verbally to the voices. But, when an hour had elapsed, he would stop listening, get up from his chair, and become active again. This system worked well for the businessman, yet when he had employed traditional techniques of suppressing the voices he had not been able to function productively in society.

Romme has also been involved in the development of self-help groups for voice-hearers throughout Europe, including a Dutch-based group by the name of RESONANCE and a British organization by the name of the Hearing Voices Network. Thousands of voice-hearers throughout Europe are now members of these specialty self-help groups. Mr. Maths Jesperson, a consumer advocate from Lund, Sweden, believes that due to the success of these unique self-help groups, many consumers are now considering Romme’s techniques.

The Finnish organization, Suomen Moniaaniset, is just one example of these many self-help groups for voice-hearers. This organization, established in 1996, supports voice-hearers nationwide by publishing newsletters and books, organizing training programs for consumers and professionals, promoting self-help activities, and lobbying for changes in the psychiatric system. Additionally, Suomen Moniaaniset offers guidance to four permanent and fully-funded consumer groups which develop training programs for professionals and which cooperate with universities to promote research on hearing voices.