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Title    Stanford Anthropologist Says Hallucinatory 'Voices' Shaped by Local Culture
Date    Saturday January 31 2015, @11:05AM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the what-kind-of-voices-do-deaf-people-hear? dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/01/31/0414217

LancePodstrong writes:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614.html

Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests.
...
For the research, Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed 60 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia – 20 each in San Mateo, California; Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India. Overall, there were 31 women and 29 men with an average age of 34. They were asked how many voices they heard, how often, what they thought caused the auditory hallucinations, and what their voices were like.
...
The Americans experienced voices as bombardment and as symptoms of a brain disease caused by genes or trauma.

One participant described the voices as "like torturing people, to take their eye out with a fork, or cut someone's head and drink their blood, really nasty stuff." Other Americans (five of them) even spoke of their voices as a call to battle or war – "'the warfare of everyone just yelling.'"

Moreover, the Americans mostly did not report that they knew who spoke to them and they seemed to have 
less personal relationships with their voices, according to Luhrmann.

Among the Indians in Chennai, more than half (11) heard voices of kin or family members commanding them to do tasks. "They talk as if elder people advising younger people," one subject said. That contrasts to the Americans, only two of whom heard family members. Also, the Indians heard fewer threatening voices than the Americans – several heard the voices as playful, as manifesting spirits or magic, and even as entertaining. Finally, not as many of them described the voices in terms of a medical or psychiatric problem, as all of the Americans did.

In Accra, Ghana, where the culture accepts that disembodied spirits can talk, few subjects described voices in brain disease terms. When people talked about their voices, 10 of them called the experience predominantly positive; 16 of them reported hearing God audibly. "'Mostly, the voices are good,'" one participant remarked.

I think this may be related to how we deal (or don't deal) with mental healthcare in this country. There's such a stigma attached that people with mental health issues start to think the worst of themselves and it creates a feedback loop of destructive thoughts. Whereas in Africa and India where it's not such a big deal, people don't get worked up about it and just take it for what it is. Just my theory anyway.

Links

  1. "LancePodstrong" - https://soylentnews.org/~LancePodstrong/

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