The meaning of hearing voices
Last updated 11/06/2007
There are many people who hear voices, some of whom cope with their voices well without psychiatric intervention, it has also been found that there are many people who hear voices who can cope with their voices and regard them as a positive part of their lives.
There appears to be an unbridgeable disagreement between the scientific community who understand the voices to be hallucinatory and a product of a deluded mind and those who regard them as something meaningful, real and even sometimes spiritual.
Hearing voices – or auditory hallucinations – are not necessarily symptomatic of an illness.
There are in our society more people hearing voices who never became psychiatric patients than there are people who hear voices and become psychiatric patients.
A cause related alternative for the harmful concept of schizophrenia
The experience of hearing voices unheard by others is probably as old as mankind and well known to the ancient Greeks, we also know it was commonly experienced in Egyptian and early Christian cultures, indeed until the eighteenth century the experience was regarded as divine rather than being considered a health issue.

A good example of this is the experience of recalling a rhyme or tune, which you find yourself repeating unconsciously under your breath and which keeps going through your head again and again. You can even find yourself humming it. You never took a decision to start thinking of it and it's difficult to stop thinking about it. The difference between the tune and "voice thought" which appears as words in your mind is that it may go on to speak coherently to you and even engage you in conversation. You, yourself are not responsible for it and you have no idea what this "voice" is going to say next.
Another theory is held by Julian Jayne’s, an American psycholigst, he wrote a book called "The origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind." Jayne’s believes that up until about 1300 BC and before the development of written language, hearing voices was common to all humanity and that the experience was all but eradicated by what we now know as consciousness.
In his view the people who hear voices today are carriers of an evolutionary residue from this ancient time. However, that is only a theory to account for the fact voices were apparently widely heard and are less so to day, at least in the Western world.
Best wishes
paul