Some spoke of hearing from God while others said they felt like their voices were an “assault” upon them. Many of those interviewed reported both good and bad voices, and conversations with those voices, as well as whispering and hissing that they could not quite place physically. The findings revealed that hearing voices was broadly similar across all three cultures, according to Luhrmann. We asked people what they found most distressing about the voices, whether they had any positive experiences of voices and whether the voice spoke about sex or God,” she said. “We then asked the participants whether they knew who was speaking, whether they had conversations with the voices, and what the voices said. They were asked how many voices they heard, how often, what they thought caused the auditory hallucinations, and what their voices were like. Overall, there were 31 women and 29 men with an average age of 34. She is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford.įor the research, Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed 60 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia – 20 each in San Mateo, California Accra, Ghana and Chennai, India. Someone should, because it’s important, and it can teach us something about psychiatric illness,” said Luhrmann, an anthropologist trained in psychology. Psychiatric scientists tend not to look at cultural variation. “The work by anthropologists who work on psychiatric illness teaches us that these illnesses shift in small but important ways in different social worlds. Luhrmann said the role of culture in understanding psychiatric illnesses in depth has been overlooked. That suggests that the way people pay attention to their voices alters what they hear their voices say. Our work found that people with serious psychotic disorder in different cultures have different voice-hearing experiences. In an interview, Luhrmann said that American clinicians “sometimes treat the voices heard by people with psychosis as if they are the uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease which should be ignored. The new research suggests that the voice-hearing experiences are influenced by one’s particular social and cultural environment – and this may have consequences for treatment. The experience of hearing voices is complex and varies from person to person, according to Luhrmann. In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology and first author of the article in the British Journal of Psychiatry. People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research. Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology, studies how culture affects the experiences of people who experience auditory hallucinations, specifically in India, Ghana and the United States.
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