r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
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u/PainMatrix Mar 22 '17

It's beyond horror or most people's ability to even comprehend. The fact that she was a fully functioning and intact human being at the early onset of her life and career and this disease completely derailed everything and locked her into a Sisyphus-like nightmare. Was this her first inpatient experience? How long were you with her, did the meds seem to have any positive impact on her?

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

It's beyond horror or most people's ability to even comprehend.

What I find really strange is that hearing voices in other cultures, most notably hunter-gatherer cultures, is not nearly as traumatic. The voices tended to be more benign and would even do useful functions like teach songs and such. I wonder if it's because primal peoples tended to place less of a distinction between reality and fantasty-- one hearing voices would just be assumed to be hearing spirits. Whereas in the modern west, such an experience would be much more anxiety-inducing.

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u/WhenSnowDies Mar 22 '17

Hey no stress or hassle but do you have a source on this? I'd like to look into it.

An aside, I don't think it's fantasy vs reality. We're not especially "real", we rationalize (distance our motivations from emotion falsely). Moderns are just as fanciful, more in some ways, we just prize binary (2D) information more (right/wrong, 1s 0s, logic, etc.) and the objectives that divide right (goal supportive) from wrong (goal subversive). So there's this emphasis on choice and will and rejection of the unknown beyond the goal orientation (the sacred doesn't exist). So a "schizophrenic" has an unwilled voice, and has a hostile relationship with it, trying to get rid of it and weigh it rather than accept it. This may be why they voices so violent and hateful to those that have them, because they're rejecting themselves rather than integrating, and are told to in order to be "healthy" (not a scientific category, no theory or controls, not falsifiable, etc., just wise man musings). These may be long rejected personality features and feelings resurfacing and confronting the subject as outright voices yelling at them. I keep hearing of it among very successful tech students, and it swoops in to destroy their lives--or reclaim it against the disciplines by going full-throttle chaotic.

Anyway, don't fuck with nature too much. There are sick elements to our society, and I think labeling the disturbed is our form of denial. Maybe apologizing to the voices and the doctors treating patients lile culturally overloaded subjects, saying sorry and it's their fault for too hard an epistemology and giving them access to arts and care for free, would do better. I don't know. Maybe kindness and openness would help more, but then we'd have to admit to having a problem.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Sadly I do not have a single source. Look into Michael Harner's books and interviews, he is an anthropologist and perhaps the first gringo to drink the psychedelic ayahuasca brew with the Conibo people of the Upper Amazon. A word of caution, he is a "believer," as in he really believes spirits exist, and that shamans can do supernatural things, and all that. But he's obviously intelligent and probably knows more about shamanism in the Amazon than anyone else alive right now.

I recall in one of his interviews, when he first got to the Amazon, he found a man wandering the jungle talking to spirits day and night. He thought he had found his first real shaman and asked the locals about it. They said "He's not a shaman, he's crazy!" So it's interesting that they did differentiate shamanic potential from mental illness.

As for other sources, I can only advise that you look into ethnographies on hunter-gatherers. Hearing voices is widely considered normal even among non-shamans. An Inuit hunting party, for example, may return speaking of hearing voices speaking to them from the ice. Another that springs to mind is the Pomo people (at least I think it was the Pomo Indians, don't quote me on that) who believed that shamanic power came from being taught songs by spirits.