What If You Heard Voices?

Hearing voices, in our culture, means suffering from some type of serious mental disorder, a psychotic disorder, generally schizophrenia. Hearing voices seems to automatically turn you into a madman, a seriously ill person marked with a label of permanent mental disorder that is not easy to face, because it is neither fair nor you have put it on yourself.

This label turns you into someone supposedly dangerous, into an aggressive person who barely lacks control and who must be medicated to stop being a danger to society. From that moment, your whole life will revolve around these psychotic symptoms, but not to understand them but to try to eliminate them.

But, very few people have stopped to listen to what those voices say and to take them in another way, in a more comprehensive and inclusive way. To try to understand the suffering of these patients who have auditory hallucinations and teach them to live with them, because what would happen if you heard voices yourself?

I hear voices and I am afraid

I hear voices, yes, I hear them. It all started one morning while I was still a teenager. I was alone in my room, although I don’t quite remember what I was doing. Suddenly, a voice, a dark, rough and almost gloomy voice began to criticize and laugh at me. Then another voice answered him, another higher voice, another voice that saw me and spoke about me.

I was very scared, there were two people that I could not see who were talking about me in the third person, who criticized me and laughed. I heard them as if they were next to me, but I couldn’t see anything, where are they hiding? How can they see me?

I began to stir the room as if I was possessed, but I was afraid, I was very anxious. Two strangers judged me mercilessly and laughed, they saw me continuously, their laughter filled my head and I couldn’t see them, I had to find them, wouldn’t you have done the same?

So I decided to yell at them to stop and I started destroying the furniture, what if they were inside them and they saw me through a hole?

It was something horrible, an anguish that I cannot describe. Just at that moment, my family, and even the neighbors, came to see what was happening. They told me that all the noise was being made by me, that I had lost control, that I had gone crazy, but could they not hear the voices? How can they not hear them if they are going to make me deaf?

And then an ambulance arrived along with the police, why did they call them? Why do they want to give me an injection? Why do they look at me strangely? Is it that they don’t hear those who insult me ​​and laugh mercilessly? I am not crazy, I only hear voices and I am afraid, very afraid.

Another way of understanding psychosis

Any of us could be the protagonist of this story, and although the first psychotic episode is usually preceded by a period of disorganized, unusual, seemingly meaningless, strange and extravagant behaviors, which may include strange ideas, it does not have to happen. always like that.

Sometimes the outbreak can arise spontaneously, without prior notice, which produces greater uncertainty and anxiety for the person suffering from it. For this reason, from movements such as Hearing Voices, it is requested that we take more into account the person behind the diagnosis and stop stigmatizing voices and begin to include them as another part of the subject’s own biography.

Not surprisingly, about 2% of the general population hears voices, but of these people, only a third present significant psychopathological alterations that lead them to seek professional help . This is so, because the problem is not the voices but the relationship that the person establishes with them.

So the next time someone tells you that they hear voices, think more about the fear that person feels, about the damage that makes them feel misunderstood, being called crazy without stopping to think about looking for an explanation for why the voices and just focus on eliminating them with drugs, because that person could be you and those voices could be your condemnation of the misunderstanding and loneliness of mental illness.