For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful

One thing that I've found fascinating is that different cultures experience hallucinations differently.

> We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience.

In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/

I've wondered if there is some sort of feedback loop where western culture associates hallucination with possession, while other cultures may see hallucinations in a more positive light, or even as a sign that you are some sort of shaman.

If the capability existed to project voices into people's heads, there would be a startup using it for advertising by now.

Oh, right, that's been done.[1] "In 2007, the advertising and marketing campaign for A&E's Paranormal State broke the mold using Audio Spotlight directional sound technology. A seven-story billboard was erected in Lower Manhattan, New York City, visually reminding the public of the channel's popular new programming. A pair of AS-24i focused sound speakers mounted above the billboard projected directional audio onto a targeted area of the sidewalk – all the way from the rooftop."

"The projected sound produced by the Audio Spotlight speakers was a woman's whispering voice that startled and entertained passersby with spooky and suggestive messages such as "Who's that?," "Who's there?," and "It's not your imagination." To those within the narrow coverage area, the sounds seemed as though they were being whispered right next to their heads, while others standing right next to them heard nothing, thanks to the focused sound beam of the Audio Spotlight."

[1] https://www.holosonics.com/applications/creative-marketing

I highly recommend this essay, written in response to a similar story in The New York Times: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense...

Although I did not speak openly of "TI" I did experience this phenomenon. Following obsessive dieting and exercising, then into a batch of seizures, I somewhat rapidly fell into the TI abyss. I consider myself today to remain a "voices hearer", although it's gotten much better over time and I am mindful to get more sleep than I need, as that's been the most curative for me.

That episode came on in 2012, and it has felt like it took > 10 years to fully recover. It certainly wasn't helpful and to the contrary extremely reinforcing when the whole snowden story broke.

This is a dreadful pit to fall into.

Pretend with me for one moment: You are single, you're looking for love in all the wrong places, mostly on OKCupid. An employee working within the NSA has stumbled upon your information in realtime in a PRISM data slurp, and has taken a personal interest - maybe they think you are weird, and they are not above abuse of their powers - and that they want to exert their "godlike" powers to toy with you - surveil you, pwn your computer, screw with your mind, etc. Keep pretending this is remotely close to reality! What recourse would you have? Would a FOIA request ever validate your claims? Where do you even begin to try to reconcile with this, as a firmly held belief?

.... My voices are illusory, they require a prompt. It can be water running, it is horribly triggered in large crowds. I still have panic attacks in Ikea (but who doesn't?)

.... I got better. It took 10 years of my life to get it back, mostly. It takes a lot out of me to even begin to try to share any of this.

I hope this post helps someone. You too can get through it.

I wouldn't believe anything in this article.

But early 2022. I started hearing voices too. They all said horrible stuff.

They claimed that people close to me (family & friends) were planning to kill me & steal my crypto.

They also gave me "evidence" that proved my friend was a professional hitman.

Looking at extremely thin, starving Ethiopians on TV they said "Look! You going to look like that, we shall make sure of it, probably worse"

A bus getting a flat tire and people pulling out tools for changing tires was interpreted by the voices as "murder weapons for bludgeoning me to death"

Fortunately, I got in touch with a psychiatrist and he gave me a combination of pills & injections.

It took about 2 years for the voices to completely disappear.

This set me back so badly financially.

Luckily I now feel very normal and confident that I was 100% delusional. I am healthy now & slowly trying to get my life back together. (been off medication for like 1½ years now)

But here is my piece of advice (as a former victim).

If someone is "hearing voices".

Don't try to call them delusional or "bring them back to reality".

What you should do is listen to them & try to provide protection.

- if they feel like they are going to be poisoned by the waiter, cook for them

- if they feel like they are being stalked, offer protection etc

Normal people my claim that this "feeds" into their delusions. But at least it works in the short term to reduce the paranoia.

There is nothing worse than thinking your wife is going to stab you in your sleep and her trying to be around you longer that she usually does. She should send you pictures/video calls of her in another continent.

So as a previous victim here is a recommended approach.

- in the short term (show empathy)

- in the long term seek psychiatric assistance

P.S

Leave your email if your happy to talk. This is a throw away account

The whole term "targeted individuals" is cope. Claiming that there is some sort of meaning to such a distorted perception of reality is just a coping strategy, very similar to conspiracy theories. It's much easier to believe that reptilians, Jews, Americans, Chinese, G20, some sort of god, Common Lisp mafia, or whoever else is controlling everything - it gives a paradoxical, false sense of control and safety (because someone, no matter who, is in control!) and also allows for free finger-pointing at "the ones at fault" whenever something bad happens as an emotional regulatory mechanism.

The world in which no one does in fact control anything, starting from the way how one's mind and body works all the way to global and cosmic scale, fails to give any sort of safety or control whatsoever, and instead puts a greater burden of responsibility on the person thinking those thoughts.

It's also much easier to think that you're targeted by someone, because then you automatically become a protagonist of some story, and therefore special by definition. It's much, much simpler and easier than the idea of being a yet-another person with a partial disability due to malfunctioning organs responsible for your internal model of reality.

Humans have a really strong drive for finding meaning where there is none, even if it means dreaming it up.

I always say that psychiatrists of today are the equivalent of doctors in the 1500s. They can give you basic advice, but because we don’t yet have a scientific understanding of consciousness, we can’t effectively treat problems therein.

Therefore wisdom indicates we should all have an open mind when discussing these matters. As we figured out germs and bacteria, I hope we will figure out these issues as well.

Several childhood friends developed either a full-blown schizophrenia or "just" psychosis - as in not auditory or thought-based communication with "entities from behind the Moon" - but a tendency to produce irrational fears based on made-up threats: "I need to park 2 miles away from my workplace and walk the remaining distance as someone is looking for my license plate there", or other made-up stuff with a pattern of being surveiled.

It's fucked up for the ill and for their beloved ones in every single case. How much I can appreciate what I believe the article tries to "sell", western societies are not capable of accepting schizophrenia as an enlightenment like Hindus do.

Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, became spiritual guide of a few "tech bros" and other famous personalities. But how he, as a psychology professor from Harvard, described his teacher - Neem Karoli Baba - makes me believe that Ram Dass finally got to understand "the thing" that was elusive for him and Timothy Leary at Harvard, by doing crazy macro doses of psychedelics and listening to an "elightened" person quite loosely attached to our reality.

Based on experiences with such people living in western countries, only the folks who accepted the diagnosis and manage their "traits" with medication are living normal lives. Two people have a pattern of ditching their meds twice a year and not telling anyone (they "feel cured", and it happens almost 6 months apart like on a timer in both cases), which causes a repeated pattern of aggression towards the family, causing physical harm to relatives, being taken by a police by force to a mental health facility). One person never accepted the diagnosis and... it's more on the sad than interesting side what you'd hear from them.

From my experience, people sticking to treatment have completely normal lives.

>Hence was born the targeted individual (TI) community: a group of people who openly shared their experiences of high-tech harassment and organised stalking

Sorry, but that sounds dangerous. Attributing mental disorders to external evil sources isn't healthy.

I firmly now believe that there is nothing wrong with hearing voices. I was in fact disturbed when I was a child and first heard it said that it was a pathology.

Now let's be clear: someone who hears phantom malicious voices, someone who takes drugs and hallucinates false things, someone whose voices impel them to cause harm: those are pathologies and should be addressed. "Hallucination" carries a negative connotation, a judgement that head-voices are invariably bad, and can't be true, because "empirical science" entirely denies the supernatural and the metaphysical reality of head-voices.

But someone who hears good voices, someone hearing voices who encourage them, or tell them to do the right thing, or calming and comforting voices: that is natural, and that should never be discouraged.

I've experienced the entire gamut of these, and I discovered that my solution is to begin to discern the good ones, to hearken to them, to obey the good voices, and little by little, they overpower the malicious types, and I'm able to withstand onslaughts of not only evil voices, but actual derision and mockery from real people near me. The voices I hear, they've come to me because of what I've heard, who I've listened to, in the past; they're composites, they're archetypes, they're echoes and memories, but they were once based in reality, and uttered by real human beings near me.

Racism and prejudice is real, and the actual tangible hatred I imbibed for decades, in reality and on the Internet, were the genesis of evil and malicious voices in my head. So: medicate all voices away and tranquilize my thoughts? We'd throw out the baby with the bathwater. Why shouldn't I hear good, encouraging voices and obey them?

The mental health system can encourage people to return to rational thought and be grounded in reality. Mentally ill people can learn appropriate behavior, it can be modeled and imitated, and people can be trained, even to discern voices and learn how to ignore or discount the bad ones.

If someone feels stalked, harrassed, targeted by technological means, the most important thing they need is reassurance and respite from that paranoia. They need to be disconnected from the ENVIRONMENTS which foster fear, hatred, and distrust. They need to be extracted from echo chambers that spread F.U.D. because it will rub off on them and drive them to harmful and hateful actions against themselves, or other innocents. Drug 'em if you must, but remember that drugs are band-aids, and it hurts to rip off a band-aid.

I had a somewhat close friend who had a very sudden and dramatic psychotic break that he disclosed to me while it was happening. He believed that people in his family were conspiring to entrap him in a criminal conspiracy, and was in a panic. This progressed further over a few days until I was no longer able to continue to try to talk him through it. There were a number of details to his beliefs that made it absolutely clear it was not real. Unfortunately I was not able to get through to him to get help (as far as I know) and the people I tried to connect him with were very unhelpful.

The reason I’m sharing this is that I think people tend to believe that people are exclusively either “crazy” or “not crazy” as an ontological property of the person, but as many other anecdotes here show, it really can happen to people randomly. Some are able to get help and recover. Some aren’t.

While I definitely wish there was someone I could have called who could go give him real aid and assistance, I also know that this could have been a terrifying, trust-breaking ordeal and possibly could have even led to violence and imprisonment, or other serious consequences.

People like to talk about “public mental health resources” but unless you’re willing to sic what amounts to police armed with tranquilizers on people who very well may (reasonably?) not wish to be subdued against their will, it’s not really that simple.

Definitely a difficult and fraught subject. I don’t think the answer is to validate psychosis however.

This is fascinating finding out about these communities. My problems were always that I believed time travel might exist. Now I can find out whether I really https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nnwn5rXEio :)

> Some get the message that their brain is broken and that they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions.

Which is true.

Sympathy and empathy are crucial in all aspects of healthcare, but referring to these psychiatric patients as "targeted individuals" seems unwise. It's patronizing and it runs the risk of encouraging further delusions.

There is nothing new about defining behaviors usually seen as psychotic as "normal":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz

Compare iconic/visualized ability to echoic recall/synthesis. Audio for humans contains thought, in speech. So hearing an engine running in mind is similar to visualizing a bus. But hearing synthesized voices is another matter entirely. I suppose the combo of the two would indeed be challenging (a talking bus for example).

What about those who hear music ?

true or not, just.. be careful to not become a subject of some NLP people (if you don't hear voices yet, you may be chosen to be traumatized for the same effect)

Story time. Long time lurker, first time writer. Please be gentle if i make formatting mistakes and correct me how to do it properly!

I had what you could call psychotic episode 3 years ago. It started by hearing faint voices from neighbours apartment (not necesserarily talking about me, but regular everyday stuff.)

I did not realise at the moment it was psychotic episode thing, i thought i just heared background noises. Mind you my current apartment was very well sound proofed but. i shrugged that off easily (voice can travel via air vents and so son).

So after couple of months i went on this electronic music festival in the woods (medium size forest festival in Finland) and in there i started hearing "other people" (whom i/we did not know) talking about me and my current fiance when we were in out tent.

First i thought it was my friends joking, but then realized it is not the case. This is where i got kinda anxious and my SO understood that something is wrong and luckily got me some medication for getting sleep (Clonazepin).

After that i stayed at the tent for the end of the festival (luckily only for one day) and was paranoid that people were talking about me and my fiance and felt very anxious about the whole situation. After couple of days when we arrived back at home it started getting more serious overtone.

Sidenote: I did not do mind altering drugs at the festival. I was there building the festival and its music stages and planned to enjoy festival after the work was done.

So these extra voices continued to haunt me back at home too.

First they were malicious in their intend, trying to spook me first in very very mundane things (did you forget to pay parking ticket etc) and then started to proceed to more deeper things like my life choices / regrets i might have had and so on.

They also told me that there are cameras in next side building filming me (did not really believe this). They also tried to convince me that they are actually gods and that i could too become god if i would kill myself. I laughed to this idea and told them that i am happy being human and would never wanna be god and/or like them.

This whole voice thing affected my possibility to get to sleep, so i could not sleep for 3-4 days in a row and that just worsened the situation, problem was not necessarily the amount of extra voices but sleep deprivation lowered my capacity to handle the criticism, ignore the things voices tol me, put things in more realistic perspective or try to reason with the voices.

So at this point i decided it is time to get some professional help and listed myself in an mental ward for evaluation. I was there for 3 weeks and they started me on some basic antipsychotics and sleeping aids that they usually give for first time psychotic breaks and i managed to get somewhat proper sleep but the voice symptoms did not go away.

After 3 weeks i got out from the hospital (with open ticket to comeback as soon as i feel like it) still hearing the voices in my head, but had medication with me (that really did not help at all, just made me emotionally numb).

During next 1-1.5 years i went through multiple different typical and atypical antipsychotic medications and none of them gave any relief for the hallucinations. At this point the hallucinations started appearing in visual field too.

I have aphantasia so the visual hallucinations appearing when i closed my eyes were very non clear, more like black on black shades. Like i could see shadows morphing to different shapes like humans running through my vision field, human shaped things holding guns, some alien like creatures and so on. Once there even was a boomer for left for dead gameseries and conehead esque figures (that was kinda funny). It was like they were trying to intimidate me believing they were aliens. Oh and i have never seen Conehead movie btw.

Some times eyes open i even saw pretty nicely "rendered" 3d hologram koi fishes floating on my ceiling and other pretty amazing visuazinery. The holograms were made of tiny blue dots and if they pop out from the surface i could push my hand through em and if i tilted my viewpoint the hologram would also tilt (so i could look at the back and/or sides of them).

Weirdly when these eye open visual come to play the voices were very nicely to me and told me that "this is just a play and or playing" and it kinda felt like they were just showing me cool things they can do. It did not feel malicious at the time. More like a show off of a skills.

These voiced entities (which there was multiple at the time, like 10 or so) showed me amazing sights projected on the ceilings and i would chit chat with them about them sometimes in wonder of the imagenary. (at this point me overall reaction to this started to became more mundane than scared because they were not aggressive towards me).

So some days after this event i went to see my parents (whom i have very good relations with) for a week and there stuff turned pretty evil. The sounds started to tell me that i should kill my self to be reborn as god or kill my parents to become a god.

This is of course refused because even i was experiencing psychotic hallucinations i was not psychotic or manic, granted i was sleep deprived but not "crazy" and did not think of doing anything stupid, was just really really tired. This was the second time i went to psychic ward because i really needed some strong medication to get sleep. I was there for 4-5 days and got out feeling better.

> It holds that these voices and beliefs – or ‘hallucinations’ and ‘delusions’ – are symptoms of a disorder such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder or schizoaffective disorder. These disorders likely stem from brain dysfunctions or defective genes... Some get the message that their brain is broken and that they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions.

That pretty much would be the smart thing to take away from a diagnosis yes. The brain is broken (not functioning correctly) if it's presenting them with hallucinations and delusions. Everyone's brain lies to them to some degree. It's usually not a huge problem, but once it becomes one there's no point in denying what's happening. That wouldn't mean that "they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions" but would mean that they should be considered suspect, especially when those thoughts and perceptions are voices in their heads or paranoia.

> But if psychiatry’s broken-brain narrative is pushing people deeper into the TI community, how did this happen?

It isn't pushing people to the TI community. Paranoid schizophrenics don't even need a diagnosis to believe that they're being targeted. It's just what they do. If reality is difficult to accept, it's understandable that a fantasy might look more inviting to them, but the answer is not to lie to patients about the reality of their situation or withhold the truth so that they feel better.

> A chorus of doctors, journalists and activists insisted that seeing mental disorders in terms of defective brain chemistry would alleviate shame and stigma. They gave the lie to the idea that extreme low mood, disabling anxiety or obsessive thoughts might represent a character flaw or a moral defect – or even bad parenting.

I'm not sure what "gave the lie" means here. Having a medical, even physiological, basis for the disorder has made it very clear that it isn't a moral failing or a choice. To that extent, mental illness has been destigmatized pretty well, but ultimately "crazy" is always going to be a bad thing to be, and something nobody wants to be. In that sense there will always be a stigma against it. No one wants to have something wrong with them. I don't think lying to people and telling people there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is something wrong with them is helpful.

The one part of the this article I can really get behind is that drugs aren't always the answer. Drugs can, in some circumstances be ineffective, or even make the situation worse. It can take a very long time to find the right drug or combination or drugs at the right doses to make things better and in the meantime there are real harms that can result from that search. Psychiatric drugs and conditions are not well understood. I do think that it will get better with time though.

I think it's reasonable to be cautious when it comes to treatment with medications, but I think it's also important to be honest and accurate about what the issues are. That means telling people their brains are wrong, and that their experiences aren't real. That psychosis is a very real problem, not a "spiritual emergency" or a "gift" or a "super power" and that it must be dealt with and managed (with or without medication).

I have a number of thoughts regarding this article.

First is the idea of "dangerous gifts" and of a mind that is oversensitized to making (perhaps spurious) connections and correlations between otherwise unrelated phenomena - related to the idea of aberrant salience in psychiatry:

    One approach saw the mad mind as a wounded mind – not wounded in the sense of broken,
    but in the sense of having survived painful life experiences. The experiences we call
    ‘paranoia’ – being hypervigilant to threats, seeing malicious motives everywhere –
    could be a protective response of the organism to real threats, rather than symptoms
    of a disease.

The hypervigilance to threats and reading of malicious motives is the shadow aspect of an innate ability to notice subtle patterns and relationships given an absolute paucity of information; its well-dignified manifestation is best exemplified by the unstable yet incisive intellect of characters such as Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes, Waterhouse from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or stock market wizards Max Cohen and (to a less psychotic extent, yet still neurodivergent in other directions) Michael Burry. An intellect that is too sensitive to patterns, capable of discerning the minutest signal out of a sea of noise, who can at times find the precise mental model that corresponds exactly to reality when no one else is able - yet also prone to confusing genuine noise for an actual signal.

A confrontation with the "demons" or "malicious motives" seen everywhere is part of the process of coming to grips with the deluge of noise that increasing the cutoff frequency of your low-pass filters (so to speak) introduces. It's this decreased attenuation of spurious correlations, hypervigilance, indeed "reality itself" that is referred to by psychonauts, shamans, and other mystical seekers in the metaphor of "opening the doors of perception/the soul." Being receptive to such subtle suggestions and inferences from the psyche within given the minutest of perceptual signals from the world without is one such "dangerous gift," and learning to harness it is one of the objectives of the spiritual quest.

Second is the obsolescence of roles once played by medicine men, shamans, faith healers, gurus, and priests in diagnosing such maladies of the mind/soul (which I consider exact synonyms of one another and are perfectly coextensive, metaphysical woo about spirits and energies need not apply) in the rising prominence of psychiatry and other "bottom up" approaches to treating psychological/spiritual (vide supra) conditions through pharmaceutical, chemical interventions that modify the "hardware layer" of the body instead of applying a solution "in software" at the level of mind/psyche/soul. While the mind/body, software/hardware relationship is bidirectional, and physical interventions can indeed result in lasting psychological change, what is de-emphasized in modern psychiatric treatment is the viability of applying solutions at a "software" or psychological level to correct maladies at the physical level. The best examples of such treatments are seen in CBT and various forms of mindfulness, though the latter's dilution and watered down presentation in western discourse is but a shadow of what practitioners of Eastern or mystical traditions will study through Vipassana, fire kasina [0], or even ceremonial magick; it is perhaps the foreignness of such traditions' languages and vocabulary, combined with the difficulty of capturing such slippery subjective experience in prose, that makes these approaches less amenable to western, analytical, quantitative discourse. Further, given that the subject matter of the psyche/soul is, necessarily, subjective, non-quantitative, and more or less opaque to outside inspection from objective observers, the tools of scientific empiricism, objective observation and reproduction, and quantitative methods, are probably ill suited for such phenomena. There are too many variables that comprise the inner phenomenological experience and internal state of one's mind/soul to control for, let alone measure, to faithfully reproduce any kind of experiment that captures, in whole and not in part, the totality of one's psyche at any given time.

    A third approach saw, in madness, a spiritual crisis or ‘spiritual emergency’, a term
    coined in the 1980s by Stanislav and Christina Grof but with roots in the work of Carl
    Jung and Abraham Maslow. In this view, the ‘self’ is a mere drop in a vast sea of
    intelligence, consciousness and love. What if what we call insanity is a form of
    unmediated contact with this cosmic intelligence? What if experiences of psychosis –
    disembodied voices, strange convictions, the sense of being out of one’s body – are
    precursors of a powerful spiritual change, one that requires a religious guide, not a
    doctor? The documentary film Crazywise (2016) tells the story of Gogo Ekhaya Esima, a
    Brooklyn activist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but who rejected her label,
    returned to her ancestral roots, and became a Sangoma traditional healer and peer
    counsellor.

As such, as pseudoscientific as psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung, and the latter's alchemical predecessors (see Jung's work Psychology and Alchemy, or the work of the Rosicrucians and "mental alchemists") are, if one wishes to attack such psychological/spiritual maladies from software (possibly in parallel to applying pharmeceutical interventions at the hardware level), a self-study of such traditions will reveal a centuries' long wealth of wisdom and experience from fellow spiritual seekers and mystical practitioners who have tread similar territory before. That being said, and in light of the previous paragraph's discussion re. difficulties in reproducibility, the inner landscape of everyone's mental terrain is different, and thus no one guru or methodology can show you the exact way out of darkness - it is truly the loneliest road, and only you can walk it for yourself; fortunately, you are also the leading expert on the geography of your inner psychological landscape.

[0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...

The majority of auditory hallucinations are negative, for example voices telling you to kill yourself or someone else. The violence and homicide rates (including stranger homicide) is dramatically higher among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The idea that it's only "stigma" that is the problem is counterproductive. I've heard it a thousand times that "They are no more dangerous than someone without the disease," which is a lie.

We should put more effort into determining underlying causes and definitive therapies rather than massaging away the unpleasant reality.

This is not an uneducated opinion, I work in the field.

Whatever your belief in "science", the horrible ways in which modern medicine all-too-often treats patients are an extremely persuasive marketing campaign for alternatives.

Normalization causes a very specific harm: it prevents ameliorative action. Speaking in terms of a "cure" causes the same harm: it prevents the continuation of help.

If we're not allowed to use words like "broken" (which I do not concede in general), surely at least we can get people to admit something like "I have a condition that makes my life difficult, and I must take some sort of steps to compensate"?