What does someone who is diagnosed with schizophrenia “hear”?

“Hearing voices?”

From time to time many of us have wondered what exactly does someone diagnosed with schizophrenia hear? There is so much information and so many myths around this subject that it is really difficult for somebody who is not a mental health professional to know what exactly is happening in minds of people that are diagnosed with schizophrenia.

To summarize, someone who is diagnosed with schizoprenia could hear different kinds of voices that had to do with:

-persecution (e.g. someone thinks that is being chased by somebody else)

-insults (e.g. someone thinks that people speak really bad or pejoratively about him/her)

-comments (e.g. someone thinks that is being judged badly about something)

-warning or commands (e.g. when someone thinks that he/she receives warning about a danger or when someone thinks that is being commanded to do something)

-religion (e.g. someone believes that God speaks to him/her or someone hears others speak really bad about God)

-threats (e.g. when someone thinks that people want to make something bad to him/her like they want to rob/poison/kill him/her or the people he/she loves)

Moreover, there are many other kinds of voices depending patients, their personal records and the type of schizophrenia which are diagnosed with. An idea about what voices someone who is diagnosed with schizophrenia could hear was uploaded to the internet from a group of mental health professionals who wanted to “provide the listener with some idea of what it might be like to experience auditory hallucinations”.

It should be signalized that nowadays there are many people who at some point start “hearing” voices but are not diagnosed with schizophrenia. During tha past years many of them were diagnosed as “schizophrenics” because of the voices that were “hearing” but later the absence of other schizophrenic symptoms and their general normal behavior (except the auditory hallucinations of course) separated them from the people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. In addition, during the last years a lot of research has been done regarding these special category of people who they just “hear voices”.

Note: Did you notice it? Nowhere in the text below there are expressions like “in the mind of a schizophrenic”, because for me and some other mental health professionals words are important when we cope with a mental health disorder. A person with schizophrenia is not only a “schizophrenic” person. Schizophrenia is not his/her identity. He/she can also be a parent, a partner, a son or a daughter of somebody else, a colleaugue, a classmate and many other things. Including all the above, he/she is also a person diagnosed with schizophrenia. But schizophrenia is not his/her whole life!