Hearing Voices and Social Isolation

We need a new model of treatment, and a new way of thinking, with regard to social isolation and hearing voices and/or so-called schizophrenia. There's a tendency for social workers, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, to bully people who hear voices and/or who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, into socially interacting more with others. This stems from two major misconceptions.

Firstly, whilst it's true that voices can be in part caused by social isolation, to simply say that voices are caused completely or mostly by social isolation, is false, ignorant, and misleading, and it leads to a lot of harm, neglect, and abuse. Voice hearers and people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia have a different way of socially interacting, and which reciprocates much more the inner and outer experiences. Non voice hearers and the non-diagnosed keep their inner and outer experiences more intact, except perhaps when they are asleep and dreaming.

Having more reciprocity between inner and outer experiences, may in fact be a much more healthier way to think, feel, and socially interact. So it is simply not true to say that people who hear voices don't socially interact, aren't socially interacting enough, or are disabled in this way. It may just be that voice hearers and diagnosed people need a certain amount of solitude to filter and transform their experiences of social interaction, and that the social interaction that voice hearers do have is experienced differently. This is the new model of treatment and way of thinking which is required towards hearing voices and diagnosed schizophrenia.

Secondly, it is the case that for many people, hearing voices actually counteract social isolation. Our voices befriend us and are like imaginary friends. This does not mean that we need to be bullied into socially interacting more, nor that we have a disability to socially interact, it just means that we have a different way of counteracting social isolation, but which is just as effective for us.

A friend of mine says that when he gets depression, the voices can lessen the impact of the depression because they reframe the experience into something more open ended. This opens up the possibility for new social interactions as I see it, but does not necessarily close the possibilities. The view that hearing voices can help prevent social isolation is quite a radical one, but a very valid one nonetheless. Voice hearers have a more complex model of social interaction.

My friend Luke mentioned that this also has a strong link to theater, and the voices are like a "dialogue sense" - an extra module in the mind. In the book The Master Game, the author Robert de Ropp explains a concept called "Inner Theater", and which is like a dialogue sense that enables spiritual growth by modeling others and mapping the highly complex structures of interaction. This may also have some similarities to what voice hearers are experiencing.