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Abstract
Background
For 25 years, the international Hearing Voices Movement and the UK Hearing Voices Network have campaigned to improve the lives of people who hear voices. In doing so, they have introduced a new term into the mental health lexicon: “the voice-hearer.”
Aims
This article offers a “thick description” of the figure of “the voice-hearer.”
Method
A selection of prominent texts (life narratives, research papers, videos and blogs), the majority produced by people active in the Hearing Voices or consumer/survivor/ex-patient movements, were analysed from an interdisciplinary medical humanities perspective.
Results
“The voice-hearer” (i) asserts voice-hearing as a meaningful experience, (ii) challenges psychiatric authority and (iii) builds identity through sharing life narrative. While technically accurate, the definition of “the voice-hearer” as simply “a person who has experienced voice-hearing or auditory verbal hallucinations” fails to acknowledge that this is a complex, politically resonant and value-laden identity.
Conclusions
The figure of “the voice-hearer” comes into being through a specific set of narrative practices as an “expert by experience” who challenges the authority and diagnostic categories of mainstream psychiatry, especially the category of “schizophrenia.”
Acknowledgement
Drafts of this paper were presented at the 2012 Association for Medical Humanities Conference and the USCD Seminar in Medical and Psychological Anthropology. The author thanks Felicity Callard, Charles Fernyhough, Sandy Jeffs, Nev Jones, Eleanor Longden and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
Declaration of Interest: The author was supported by two Wellcome Trust grants: “Medicine and Human Flourishing” WT086049 and “Hearing the Voice” WT098455. The author reports no conflict of interest.
Notes
Although the term is being more widely used in certain clinical contexts such as early intervention in psychosis.
Note that for many in the Hearing Voices Movement this process of sense-making can only happen when the devastating effects of trauma and adversity are fully acknowledged.
Pointing to distinctions in the way schizophrenia and voice-hearing have been construed in narrative terms does not do justice to wider debates about the status of narrativity itself. For a review of these debates, see Woods (Citation2011b); for a critical account of narrative “loss” in psychosis and its consequences for clinical practice, see Thomas (Citation2008).