Hearing VoicesHow schizophrenia can teach us to listen
when i was writing that yesterday
i remember feeling very on edge agitated
and excited
i think i was thinking about things i
wouldn’t normally think about
i have control over everyone and can
manipulate people for my own benefit
i don’t need to eat ever again
this morning i’m in a low
the only thing i want to do today is die
my body is completely drained of all
energy
like an empty shell that’s being
unkindly forced to exist in suffering
i don’t want to compose i don’t want to
eat
i just want to die if i had a gun right
now
i’d shoot myself
i’ve just eaten and i’m too drained to
even pull a trigger
i wrote that down in 2017 on day 32 of
my
five-month admission into a psychiatric
unit
after a completely uneventful childhood
a wash of psychosis
mania and depression engulfed my life
for about a year
after being discharged and receiving a
myriad of medical opinions
i finally received the news matthew
you’ve got schizophrenia
specifically diagnosed with
schizoaffective disorder
the condition encompasses both elements
of bipolar disorder or depression
and schizophrenia where the sufferer may
both have mania and depression
as well as psychotic symptoms such as
hearing voices seeing things
or holding delusional beliefs
now i’ve been hearing voices on and off
since i was about 14 years old
but it was only at university when these
started to impact my day-to-day life
they would shout at me when i was trying
to listen talk over me when i was trying
to speak
or just tell me that today is going to
be a bad day
at the end of my hospital diaries though
i wrote a short note to myself
it said you’ve got no choice other than
to hear voices
but you can choose how you listen to
them
over the few years of psychological
treatment that followed
many therapists seem to echo the same
thing
there’s nothing that you can do to stop
the voices in the moment
but you can change how you react to them
now there’s a parallel here between
mental health and physical pain
treatment
if you suffer from an excruciating pain
in your elbow
you can become increasingly frustrated
by the pain
or you can focus deeply on the pain
noticing and being mindful of every
element of the pain
how the pain may pulsate or ache or
radiate up the arm
focusing on the elements that make up
the pain can often help you in
dismantling the internal structures
that cause your initial frustration and
anger towards that pain
now for me it’s the same with hearing
voices
i might be hearing a voice telling me
that you’re worthless
it might be repeating that short phrase
over and over again like a mantra
or a fire alarm but
instead of getting increasingly
frustrated with the voice
i try and dismantle the individual
elements of that
sound i won’t hear the words as words
i’ll listen to the pitch the speed
the texture how it’s articulated and
pronounced
as someone with schizophrenia i feel
that i could deal with voices better
but as a composer and musician more
importantly
i still found listening to music really
difficult
so maybe if i listen to music in the
same way i listen to the voices
i might hear sound in a new way
so i tried it and i did
i began listening to music i never
thought i’d listening to
focusing intensely on dismantling the
specific qualities of each sound
i heard the more i listened
the more self-aware i became and
subsequently
the better my mood was this doesn’t have
to just apply to music you don’t like
or music you do like so an exercise
find a piece of sound it might be a
soundscape
or some ambient sound or it might be
some music
make it a mission to invest every bone
in your body
to listen to that sound notice the
different layers the textures
how it might even interact with your
surrounding environment
now this doesn’t have to just relate to
a more formal listening experience
though
it might be the sounds around you when
you’re walking through a woodland
waiting in a queue or sitting on a bus
try walking slower when you can take
time out and allow your mind to wander
between what is
the consuming whole and the intricate
parts
of your environment because you never
know what you might hear
growing up my only real exposure to the
word schizophrenia
was through the media and specifically
criminality
i’ve experienced firsthand the
stigmatization of people suffering with
conditions from psychosis
perhaps though by listening to people
who suffer from these conditions
we can not only understand better what
it means to live with schizophrenia
and psychosis but we also may take away
coping mechanisms that can be brought
into our own lives
because after all it’s not just about
hearing
our voices it’s about listening