Hearing voices used to be pathologised. The rosenbaum experiment famously publicised the fallacy of the psychiatric system. The subjects were deemed sane but when they described hearing voices and...I assume though it wasn't mentioned in the study...described distress as well they were incarcerated and drugged.
The experiment is also know as the thud experiment and it is well worth looking up. Diagnosis and theory has changed somewhat. Hearing voices isn't enough as a sole symptom though it still dominates schizophrenia diagnosis.
I don't believe hearing a voice in your head or having an inner dialogue - or however else individuals describe it - is pathological.
However, I believe this normal state of awareness of consciousness is also an state of prgoress. People have to evolve or learn or otherwise to get to this state. We all experience a stream of consciousness. This is without doubt in my opinion. We experience thoughts.
How we experience thoughts and consciousness is obvious as a thing which exists. How we describe it may be different. Of course. Thoughts may be considered like voices. They are not heard via the aural pathway but they are heard within the stream of consciousness.
This may be normal. Schizophrenics may experience something different. Regardless, not all of us experience the conversation in our head either. Few of us ever talk about it and I guess this important. Why don't we talk about the conversation in our head?
I am...well...I'm being crazy...so let me continue.
The voice in a persons head became pathologised by psychiatrists dealing with people in asylums. I've just asked a random stranger if they chat to themselves and they said yes. Almost 2 centuries ago I couldn't have. I couldn't have turned to another person in the pub - a stranger - and asked the question because it was considered abnormal.
It was considered abnormal because people didn't talk about it. When they did it was called madness. But this was what psychiatry called it back in those days. Afterwards - in our time - it was okay.
Before psychiatry it was judged a different way. But I don't want to talk about the oppression of the schizophrenic before psychiatry.
I want to think about how a state of consciousness....or perhaps awareness of consciousness.. develops in a species.
The presumption at the time about consciousness was based upon what people with power agreed was the same as their own consciousness. The power holders had not reached the state of awareness where they could recognise the inner dialogue. Language barriers meant genuine auditory hallucinations - significantly different experiences - became mixed in with new experiences of ordinary consciousness, or shifts in awareness, got amalgamated.
Evolution of consciousness may also be a painful path, painful because of those who don't evolve. Homo erectus may know what this felt like. To a monkey an upright human is hard to understand but to evolution it is progress.
To the unevolved human having a voice in our head is hard to understand without the evolution. As human evolution of consciousness proliferates despite psychiatry's attempts more 'normal' people experience this raised awareness of consciousness.
This is why today - irrespective of the thud experiment or changes in the rigour of psychiatric pathologisation - I can ask a random stranger if he has a conversation in their head.
In kareplin's day I would be mad and this mentality still has an effect today. Before karepin and his ilk there was religion to judge and explain this human difference.
I remember writing a response to a radio production about alternatives to schizophrenia - perspectives I mean. I remember right now describing pathologisation as seeing an elephant through a telescope. Psychiatry sees 5 legs and the fifth one as an abomination.
What if the trunk is progress? What if what psychiatry suppresses has value to the individual as well as the human race?
Sent from my smartphone
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