PDF Ebook Hearing Voices, by Simon McCarthy-Jones
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Hearing Voices, by Simon McCarthy-Jones
PDF Ebook Hearing Voices, by Simon McCarthy-Jones
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The meanings and causes of hearing voices that others cannot hear (auditory verbal hallucinations, in psychiatric parlance) have been debated for thousands of years. Voice-hearing has been both revered and condemned, understood as a symptom of disease as well as a source of otherworldly communication. Those hearing voices have been viewed as mystics, potential psychiatric patients or simply just people with unusual experiences, and have been beatified, esteemed or accepted, as well as drugged, burnt or gassed. This book travels from voice-hearing in the ancient world through to contemporary experience, examining how power, politics, gender, medicine and religion have shaped the meaning of hearing voices. Who hears voices today, what these voices are like and their potential impact are comprehensively examined. Cutting edge neuroscience is integrated with current psychological theories to consider what may cause voices and the future of research in voice-hearing is explored.
- Sales Rank: #1349003 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-03-22
- Released on: 2012-03-22
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"This is a well-structured book enhanced by the author's engaging and informative prose. It should prove intriguing and informative for researchers and healthcare professionals, as well as voice-hearers themselves."
Iain McGowan, University of Ulster, The Psychologist
"... a comprehensive, indeed encyclopedic text ... This book will bear re-reading. It is equally accessible to the specialist as to the generalist. There is a wealth of information, a keen examination of theory, a critical disposition, and above all it is interesting and engaging."
Femi Oyebode, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Birmingham and National Centre for Mental Health, The British Journal of Psychiatry
"Overall, this is a book well worth acquiring. Voices occur within real people (with all their complexity), as books come from real authors. When we attempt to indulge the fantasy that we can talk of one without the other, we do a disservice to all concerned. McCarthy-Jones recognizes this and has written a book that has much to inform the reader and, most important, induces respect and empathy for those in our communities who are voice hearers."
Dr P�draig Collins, Community Adult Mental Health Services, PsycCRITIQUES
"This work invites the reader to consider and integrate evidence from history, neuroscience, psychology and voice-hearers: an endeavour which is made enjoyable by the engaging narrative and sometimes humorous commentary of the author throughout. McCarthy-Jones appears equally committed to thorough research, scientific evidence and the well-being of voice-hearers. This work is an indispensable resource for voice-hearers, carers, clinicians and researchers. Highly recommended."
Psychosis
"... an epic, systematic and comprehensive treatise which is both fascinating and informative ..."
Nick O'Connor, Australasian Psychiatry
About the Author
Simon McCarthy-Jones is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Macquarie University's Centre for Cognitive Science, in Sydney, Australia.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Pretty much the Bible
By Rico
It's hard to know where to start with such a comprehensive book. It covers the sweep of history and it covers contemporary developments both.
For those interested in a broad history of Western voice hearers and historical views of voice hearing, including ancient, medieval and modern attempts to explain the phenomenon, it's great. It doesn't look with the kind of depth at any one specific voice hearer that books like "Muses, Madmen, and Prophets" or "Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity" does, but it is far more successful in giving a broad view than those books are, which may highlight a few well-known voice hearers or theories in depth but simply don't have the broad historical scope. And for a subject as important as voice hearing, seeing how voice hearers have been viewed and treated by society, moving from valued members of society to a group that is pathologized and stigmatized and understood only as having an illness, that is an important perspective indeed.
The book looks at the lived experiences of voice hearers and classifies their experience into broad categories that may be useful in understanding how the brains of voice hearers are working. The author makes clear that what differs between "sick" and "healthy" voice hearers (those who are distressed and incapacitated by the experience and those who do just fine) is often a matter of attitude: whether you accept and cope with the experience or not. If you have an experience and aren't bothered by it, you're healthy. If you have the exact same experience, but it does bother you, then you're sick. What you begin to question is the priorities and classifications of the mental health profession -- which is changing, but not nearly quickly enough. Also, I'm simplifying here, but if the review is not to be as long as the book itself, I have to do this a little. The book also points out the interesting contradiction in how the mental health field regards the experience in terms of culture. If your culture values voice hearing and accepts it as, for instance, a common aspect of your religion, then it's normal. If your culture doesn't, then it isn't. This distinction goes to point up how often mental health categories are determined by cultural attitudes, not by so-called objective science.
The part of the book that most general readers will probably profit from least is the long section devoted to neurological studies of the brains of voice hearers. Why? Because it's study after study after study of the results of brains scans and brain imaging whose significance, if you're not a trained scientist, will probably not be clear. It gets tedious, and while I freely admit I'm not a trained scientist myself, I often found myself wondering exactly what the point was. One study finds something -- and it seems like the next contradicts it, or the sample wasn' big enough, or it just can't duplicate the results. (This isn't the fault of the author, of course: he's just presenting the evidence.) Or a study finds something, but what its real significance is can be hard to discern. Just how big are the differences we're being shown here? I'm glad that this review of information was included in the book for the use of researchers, but I'm sure that for general readers who are simply trying to learn about the phenomenon, these sections will be more information than they are looking for. While the author does finally tie his reviews of studies of different kinds of neurological studies into the classifications of different types of voices that he'd already mentioned and so the mystery of what it's all about is cleared up, it takes a very long time to get there. He might have simply given us a preview first, before we had to wade through all this information. But again, as a review for those really interested in the neurology of it all, it's probably quite valuable.
The book then turns to look at what is going on in the world of voice hearers themselves. The book highlights what seems to be the significance of trauma in the lives of voice hearers -- it's something the overwhelming majority seem to have experienced -- whether that is in the form of physical, emotional or sexual abuse, neglect, PTSD from accidents and combat and other traumas, or bereavement. Half of all combat veterans with PTSD, for instance, end up hearing voices. The book goes on to look at how social factors may influence voice hearing. For instance, since voice hearers are usually abused, and since abuse is perpetrated by those seeking power, who are most often disempowered in some ways themselves, which is often people who are poor -- thus poverty can lead by a chain of causation to hearing voices. Unfortunately, it seems that not nearly enough research has been done in this biopsychosocial area for the picture to be really clear about what is going on yet.
The book explores the Hearing Voices Movement, in which voice hearers have begun to gather together in groups to address their problems, and it highlights the importance of new forms of therapy, especially that of the Maastricht Approach, pioneered by the psychologist Marius Romme and others in the mental health field and by voice hearers themselves. Both of these phenomena concentrate on the role of trauma and in working with voices to transform what is often an unsettling and traumatic experience itself into one in which the voice hearer's relationship with the voices can be transformed and the voice hearer's own personal conflicts, which often revolve around feelings of shame about their past experience of abuse and trauma, can be resolved.
The author critiques the current split between a mental health profession which sees voices as a sign of brain problems and pathology and the experience of many voice hearers themselves, who often find meaning in their experience. Merely finding neurological changes in the brain activity of voice hearers is not, in and of itself, a sign of pathology. As the author laudably notes one researcher's views, "But just because something is associated with neurological changes does not make it a disease. Bentall has made this point satirically by proposing happiness be classified as a mental disorder, due to its tendency be associated with reckless behavior and the presence of demonstrable neural changes."
The author is quite clear that hearing voices is not, in and of itself, pathological. He even goes so far as to suggest that we commit one heresy of the modern psychological profession -- that voice hearers may be the ones in the best position to address the issues that come with voice hearing and that more voice hearers need to be involved in research. Having heard voices myself and become interested in entering the field of psychology for those purposes, I was told quite bluntly by a successful psychiatrist that it might be hard for me to get into a psychology grad school because of my life experience. Psychologists, he told me, are quite sensitive to the public's perception that they are often as disturbed as their patients, and wish to avoid the stigma of another patient becoming a practitioner. This recalled for me Kay Redfield Jamison's fear of revealing to her psychology colleagues that she was herself bipolar. I hope that the profession might come to understand that having been there is a valuable perspective, but expecting that change overnight is probably unrealistic.
My critique, then, is not aimed at the author of this book, who seems to be circumspect, knowledgable, and wise. It is aimed at the existing field. The author, after all, does not advocate a position that views voice hearing as pathological. Quite the contrary. He seems to maintain an admirable openness to all sources of information, while taking an informed historical view that separates the wheat from the chaff. Yet, when one reads a couple hundred pages of explanations of what is going on neurologically when one hears voices, it is difficult not to see this not as an attempt to describe simply what is happening, but as an attempt to pathologize what is happening. When one reads theories of what is going on in the minds of voice hearers, it is easy to see these not as theories of what is happening, pure and simple, but as theories of what is going wrong. And since these descriptions and theories seem to present inconclusive evidence of what would seem to be meaningless dysfunctions of the brain, it is easy, as a voice hearer who has found his voices to be meaningful, internally consistent, not at all random, and manifestations of an intelligence distinct from myself, from the emotional tone they take to the kinds of words they use to the grammatical structures of their speech (always calling me "you," for instance), to find myself thinking that the brain scientists and theorists are barking up the wrong tree entirely. When millions of us have similar experiences both with our voices and with trauma and abuse, and voices seem to be connected to how we deal with trauma and abuse, what seems to be needed is not a description of what the brain is doing wrong, but what it is doing right -- of how the voices are not a symptom of disease or disorder, but a sign that evolution, in some strange way, is doing its job. It also seems to me that there is a complete lack of a synthesis of the two perspectives of research/theorists on the one hand and voice hearers on the other. Voice hearers experience their voices as an intelligence outside their own. Ascribing that intelligence to god or to angels or demons or aliens or other people might be naive, to use a pejorative term, but is it any less naive to ignore the intelligence and internal consistency of voices and ascribe them to some sort of meaningless disease? Has no one put the two points of view together? That it might be both another intelligence and a part of the brain as it has evolved? In the whole book, out of hundreds of pages of theory and different points of view, I found only a couple references to either evolution or the idea that voices might represent a form of co-consciousness. If the only successful interventions are those which have taken the actual experience of voice hearers seriously, wouldn't it stand to reason that the theory might reflect that in some way also? Again, this isn't the author's fault. It's just the state of the psychology field.
All in all, an outstanding book. The faults of the material are not the faults of the author, who does an outstanding job of giving a view of the subject that is historical, scientific, personal and theoretical. If you're really interested in the subject, you may find yourself reading it twice.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great book!
By dc321
Extremely informative text on the subject of auditory hallucinations. Very comprehensive. Great book!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
I enjoyed the book and recommend it
By Karen Henriksen
There's a lot of info on many levels . I enjoyed the book and recommend it.
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