In the HVN there is one singular and guiding rule: we are not allowed to tell each other what to believe or what to do. That said we certainly do not need to shy away from sharing commonly held facts surrounding this globally documented phenomenon. Rather sharing grounding realities is strongly encouraged, as these are the building blocks to form personal and cultural foot holds onto the world amidst what is a torturous affliction for many.

Below is a collection of facts and citations surrounding this phenomenon that would help any experiencer integrate this mental phenomenon into a functional, proven, and widely held world view. Reddit limits how many citations can be included in a single post so you may need to Google/LLM on your own.

How Common is Voice Hearing:

1.      Millham & Easton (1998) UK mental-health nurses/student nurses; broad auditory-hallucination questionnaire**. Results: 84%** reported experiences described as auditory hallucinations.

2.      Posey & Losch (1983) 375 nonclinical college students. Results: 71% reported at least one brief voice-type auditory hallucination while awake; 36% heard their name while alone; 39% heard thoughts spoken aloud; 5% had conversations with a voice.

3.      Flury (2001) UK adults/adolescents using similar measures. Results: 77.2% of adults and 73.2% of adolescents confirmed more than 1 auditory-hallucinatory experience and type.

4.      Alderson-Day et al. (2019) Large general-population sample, N=5,115. Results: 53.6% lifetime auditory hallucination, with 25.6% reporting AH in the past month and 22.7% in the past week.

5.      Ohayon (2000) Representative UK/Germany/Italy sample, N=13,057. Results: 38.7% reported some type of hallucinatory experience; this included multiple sensory modalities and sleep-related experiences.

Anthropological research has described Indigenous communities where experiences such as hearing voices, seeing spirits, or communicating with the dead are culturally ordinary and extremely widespread; older Inuit ethnography, for example, reports that “almost every” person could recount such extraordinary experiences, including hearing voices from ice or stones, while modern research found auditory verbal hallucinations in about 34% of Maasai women. A Cultural Reader on Aboriginal Perspectives in Canada, Myers (2015).

Voice-Hearing Is as Old as Written History Itself:

The earliest surviving records interpreted by historians as voice-hearing date to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the third millennium BCE (roughly 4,000 – 5,000 years ago), where hearing voices was often understood as communication between humans and the divine; not as disease or madness. Some of humanity's oldest literature depicts the mind less as the private being of an isolated individual and more as a place where gods, ancestors and other agents could speak and influence action. Julian Jaynes controversially proposed that we should take this literally: that ancient people commonly experienced thoughts and decisions as voices of external beings, and that the private, introspective view of oneself (familiar to westerners) developed later. If you are interest in Julian Jaynes or the history of the Bicameral Mentality (a phrase used to coin this concept) see here. It is a concept that runs through all ancient literature, a library that has already mapped all human experience and culture in repetitions.

16 Noteworthy Historical Figures Known to Have Heard Voices:

1.    Socrates - Greek philosopher; foundational figure in Western philosophy. Reported a lifelong daimonion-a divine voice/sign that warned or restrained him.
2.    Paul the Apostle - Apostle central to the development of Christianity. Reportedly heard Jesus address him during his conversion on the road to Damascus.
3.    Augustine of Hippo - Philosopher, theologian and Church Father. Reported hearing a child's voice repeatedly telling him tolle lege (“take up and read”).
4.    Hildegard of Bingen - Medieval polymath, composer, writer and mystic. Recorded divine voices accompanying her extensive visionary experiences.
5.    Margery Kempe - Christian mystic and author of an early English autobiography. Reported conversations with God and saints, including physically hearing a loud voice call “Margery.”
6.    Joan of Arc - French military leader, heroine and saint. Testified extensively that she heard voices she identified as St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
7.    Martin Luther - Theologian who catalyzed the Protestant Reformation. Reported encounters and communications with the Devil.
8.    Teresa of Ávila - Influential Spanish mystic, writer and Catholic saint. Reported repeated divine “locutions” words perceived as originating from God.
9.    John Bunyan - Puritan preacher and author of The Pilgrim's Progress. Described internally perceived words/voices associated with God and Satan.
10.  Blaise Pascal - Mathematician, physicist and philosopher. Experienced an intense religious revelation recorded in his Memorial.
11.  Emanuel Swedenborg - Scientist, engineer, philosopher and theologian. Reported years of conversations with spirits and angels, including explicitly auditory experiences.
12.  William Cowper - Major 18th-century English poet. Reported extraordinary divine/demonic communications during periods of psychological crisis.
13.  William Blake - Poet, painter and visionary artist. Reported seeing and communicating with angels, spirits and deceased historical figures.
14.  Mahatma Gandhi - Leader of India's nonviolent independence movement. Described hearing an unmistakable “inner voice,” which he identified with God.
15.  Sigmund Freud - Founder of psychoanalysis. Reported repeatedly hearing his name called by an “unmistakable and beloved voice,” explicitly calling the experiences hallucinations. (what a “mo-fo”)
16.  Carl Jung - Founder of analytical psychology. Experienced autonomous voices/figures and deliberately conversed with them during the period documented in The Red Book.

16 Noteworthy Contemporary Figures (Last 100 Years) Known to Have Heard Voices:

1.     Martin Luther King Jr. - Civil-rights leader. Heard a guiding voice he understood as divine.
2.    Carlos Santana - Legendary guitarist. Reports spiritual voices and angelic guidance.
3.    Philip K. Dick - Influential science-fiction author. Experienced voices and communication with an external intelligence.
4.    Anthony Hopkins - Academy Award-winning actor. Describes an autonomous voice commenting on his life.
5.    John Frusciante - Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist. Reports numerous distinct voices, including guiding and hostile ones.
6.    Zoë Wanamaker - Award-winning actor. Reports voices that comment and converse with her.
7.    Leonard Cohen - Legendary singer-songwriter and poet. Described autonomous voices and spiritually inspired creative experiences.
8.    Johnny Cash - Country-music icon. Reported hearing divine guidance and the voice of God.
9.    Stephen King - Bestselling horror author. Describes characters and stories speaking and developing autonomously.
10.  Jordan Peterson - Psychologist and bestselling author. Describes autonomous inner voices, dreams and revelatory experiences. His methods to wellness and acclaimed success are detailed in this post.
11.  Bob Dylan - Nobel Prize-winning songwriter. Describes songs arriving autonomously, sometimes as if received rather than composed.
12.  Paul McCartney - Beatles songwriter. Describes music arriving autonomously through dreams and inner hearing.
13.  Marshall Mathers (Eminem) - Rapper and songwriter. Repeatedly writes about voices, competing selves and an autonomous “Slim Shady.”
14.  Robyn Fenty (Rihanna) - Singer and entrepreneur. Sings directly of living alongside “voices inside of my head.”
15.  Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) - Singer, songwriter and actor. Publicly reports having “voices in my head” since childhood.
16.  Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd) - Singer-songwriter and producer. Repeatedly depicts voices, altered selves and internal dialogue in his music.

Many of the above historical and contemporary figures write boldly and clearly about hearing from these external personalities during the most trying or pivotal moments and decisions of their life. It would only follow that they heard them earlier and elsewhere as these exposures did not send them spiraling into shock; rather these were functional and weathered people with integrated world views surrounding the experience. This is a very terse list of what is no doubt an endless lineage of noteworthy experiencers.

To add evidence to the list of artists who write about this experience in their own work here are 3 playlists to entire genres of music chalked full of the direct language found within the HVN. And again, to underscore how pervasive this experience is these playlists only contain works that are green and purple in their album art; a very narrow selection of a vast library of music devoted to this mental experience. New-wave, Psyche-rock, Hardcore. Searches on aggregate lyric sites that allow for these queries yield results in the thousands to 10’s of thousands. One example is seen here yielding over 23,000 results. To put this succinctly and forthrightly, the evidence of this mental/spiritual experience is everywhere in western media. Its prevalence is the evidence to how integral this all is to the human condition and how surmountable the burden is, provided the correct strategy and perspective.

Chemical Imbalance Theory and a Cross-examination of Modern Eugenics Practices:

The popular “chemical imbalance theory” was never established scientific fact. Journalist Robert Whitaker has documented how psychiatry and pharmaceutical marketing popularized the idea that mental disorders resulted from defective brain chemistry, despite researchers never demonstrating such an imbalance in patients before treatment. This was simply a made-up idea, something done to sell drugs. Psychiatric drugs certainly alter brain chemistry, but (as Whitaker emphasizes) that does not establish that they are correcting a pre-existing chemical defect. Today, even mainstream psychiatric literature recognizes the simple chemical-imbalance explanation as unsupported. Moncrieff 2023, Robert Whitaker – Anatomy of an Epidemic.

Psychiatric knowledge has a surprisingly short shelf life: estimates of these industry’s “half-life of knowledge” is brief. While diagnostic categories themselves are repeatedly revised, the DSM-5 replaces numerous diagnoses and criteria from previous editions. Half of the information contained within the DSM-5 is thrown out every 7 years. Psychopharmacology has an average “Half-Life of Knowledge” of 4.8 years, meaning every 4.8 years half of the industry’s methods and understandings are done away with. 4.8 years of missteps that carry lifelong consequences for patients.

Psychology and psychiatry are evolutions of eugenics industries, this history is non-negotiable. Many of the early architects of psychological testing, psychometrics, statistics, and psychiatric classification were invented under the umbrella of eugenics. A practice using supposedly scientific categories to identify who was “normal,” “defective,” or “unfit”; these classifications helped justify segregation, institutionalization, forced sterilization, and ultimately far worse (lobotomies, Et al.). After eugenics became indefensible, the language surrounding these practices has been reworked but many of the underlying tools of categorizing people against population norms survive and evolve into modern psychological testing, psychiatric diagnosis, and modern treatment. This history demands that we remain deeply skeptical whenever this questionable and oppressive state appointed authority is used to transform human difference into defect. Also see: History of eugenics, The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry, Eugenics and its evolution in the history of western psychology: A critical archival review, Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences, Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 - Present).

Mandatory Reporting:

Mandatory reporting is a legal requirement that compels designated professionals to break confidentiality and report certain information when they believe a legally defined threshold has been reached. In mental-health settings, this can mean that what a person says about harm or danger is assessed by an individual professional (their personal opinion/interpretation), whose judgment can initiate non-consensual interventions such as involuntary commitment (being arrested and held within an asylum). Topics that legally force the actions of mandatory reporters include but are not limited to simple thoughts of: self-harm, self-neglect, loss of personal agency, harming another person, or any inclination that can be argued as dangerous. While there is minor legal variance between states it is effectively guaranteed that all teachers, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, nurses and most all other healthcare professionals are mandated reporters. Simply speaking of your past lived experience (an internal experience of the mind with zero evidence) can cause a series of irreversible systematic decisions to occur rendering you with fewer rights (if any) outside of the walls of an asylum. This, for life in some states in the US.

A Comparison of Wellness Strategies and Reported Outcomes:

Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes (2023) Finds only 5% of medicated patients find states of recovery, this is a diminishing trend over time. Additionally, 40% of diagnosed people find wellness all on their own and away from psychiatric care. More so 80% of these individuals find wellness when exposed to programs such as Open Dialogue, Soteria, and other methods paralleling the Hearing Voices Network’s methods. This is not one small study: the 55-page report synthesizes well over 100 sources spanning more than half a century of psychiatric research, including randomized trials, 15-20 year longitudinal studies, systematic reviews, national mortality datasets, and decades-long evaluations of alternatives such as Soteria and Open Dialogue. Collectively, the underlying literature encompasses many thousands (and through population-level studies, potentially hundreds of thousands) of individual patient records, although the report does not calculate a deduplicated participant total.

To further supplement the Open Dialogue/HearingVoicesNetwork approach see: This Video Explaining the Open Dialogue approach where more than 85% of participants report wellness into full recovery within 5 years. Less than 10% of participants take any medications at all during their involvement, generally the only medications prescribed are sleep aids over the first 2 weeks of participation (again for less than 10% of participants). Through discussion and real community, peers help to mend each other’s mental burdens.

Obviously, it would only follow that if you were interested in getting well you ought to consider just going to a few of the meetings linked to all over this subreddit. Here is our 7-day calendar, this is also linked in every AutoModerator comment in every thread.

Time-dependent effect of antipsychotic discontinuation and dose reduction on social functioning and subjective quality of life (2023) A Lancet-family, preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 studies involving 5,924 people, with follow-ups ranging from one month to 15 years. Researchers compared continued antipsychotic maintenance with dose reduction/discontinuation, specifically examining social functioning and quality of life rather than simply symptom suppression or relapse. Across all studies there was no significant overall advantage for either approach, but a striking pattern emerged with time: studies lasting 2–5 years significantly favored reduction/discontinuation for social functioning, and studies beyond 5 years favored it even more strongly. The authors therefore found evidence that the apparent functional advantage of maintenance treatment decreases and reverses as follow-up becomes longer, directly challenging conclusions drawn exclusively from short-term drug trials. More so it is strongly implied that the initial positive reports (very early in administration) are a result of a placebo’s effect. There’s no measurement happening here, its just patients saying “yes I feel better” or “no I don’t.” Additionally, there’s the phenomenon of involuntary commitment and hope for freedom granted in tandem with wellness. It seems very dubious that any short-term self-reported benefits are genuine.

Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes (2023) [LEFT] - Time-dependent effect of antipsychotic discontinuation and dose reduction on social functioning and subjective quality of life (2023) [RIGHT]

On Being a Healthy Member of a Community and What Makes a Community Healthy:

A Parallel - The Deaf Community: For centuries, Deaf people were commonly treated primarily as defective individuals requiring correction rather than as people capable of defining their own experience, language, culture, and institutions. Deaf people increasingly organized around a radically different proposition: nothing about us without us; their language belonged to them, their communities belonged to them, and hearing authorities should not possess exclusive authority to determine what a successful Deaf life looked like. The National Association of the Deaf was founded by Deaf leaders in 1880 to defend sign language and collective self-determination after hearing educators attempted to suppress signing; Deaf schools and institutions subsequently became crucial spaces where a shared language, culture, and political identity could flourish. The struggle culminated symbolically in Deaf President Now (1988), when Gallaudet students successfully demanded that the world's leading Deaf university finally be led by a Deaf person; 124 years after its founding. The Hearing Voices Movement proposes a strikingly similar transfer of authority: experiencers are not merely objects to be studied, diagnosed, managed, or spoken for; they can organize, educate one another, develop their own language for their experiences, run their own communities, and possess expertise that cannot be replaced by professional observation from the outside.

Many paralleling peer-support communities seem to be devoted to the emotional turmoil of internalized social disconnection. These spaces seem collectively in the grips of a crippling emotional dependency. There certainly are ethos out there (contemporary and historical) that lead vulnerable people out of this social station.

The Rules of Community/Friendship: This 27-minute video explains core concepts of Game Theory. If you watch the video you’ll see there are 4 hierarchical behavioral tests present in any social setting. Whether you are attempting to make friends at school, find the best romantic partner, gain a raise at your job, simply get a job, make the most through investing… ANY SOCIAL SETTING; the rules that govern success are as follows:

1. Be honest and share/trade fairly and forthrightly
2. Don’t help others who do not do rule 1
3. The first to forgive appropriately wins the most
4. Don’t collaborate with others you cannot make sense of and be easy to read yourself.

That’s it, that’s all there is to it. If you can’t make sense of your voices perhaps it makes sense to disregard them. If you can’t make sense of someone you are employing to help you with your voices perhaps stop paying them. If your friends and family won’t tell you things you’d tell them perhaps you should take that as a hint. Most all the vulnerable people in the HVN and paralleling mental health spaces are themselves victims of survived abuse and other neglect.

Lastly, a few of the subreddits devoted to illness frameworks are boldly and unashamedly run by people who’ve worked in these aforementioned eugenics industries. There is little to nothing to suggest that these spaces should be looked at as actual peer-led support. It is routine in these spaces for members to flatly diagnose each other and direct each other to seek specific compounds by name brand. Paring this behavior with the above studies that prove how certain the harm is from doing this; the terms “lay malpractice” and “class action lawsuit” come to mind.

Weekly In-Person Hearing Voices Group Coming to Berkeley

The Bay Area Hearing Voices Network (BAHVN) is excited to announce a new weekly, in-person adult Hearing Voices group beginning this September in Berkeley.

📍 North Berkeley Senior Center
📅 Every Thursday
🕕 **6:00–7:**30 PM
📌 Corner of Hearst Ave & MLK Jr. Way, Berkeley

The group will be facilitated by BAHVN facilitators Kenneth “Kozi” Arrington and Giselle Kurdi.

“We are excited about being able to once again meet in person with hearing voices group members,” says Kozi Arrington, in-person HV group facilitator. “There is something special about being able to have in person contact with folks that also helps us build community and compassion with group members. I look forward to it.”

Whether you’re new to the Hearing Voices approach or have been part of a group before, all adults with lived experience of hearing voices or other unusual experiences are welcome.
Come connect, share experiences, and learn from one another in a supportive, non-judgmental environment.

More details coming soon. Please share with anyone who may benefit from this group.

#BayAreaHearingVoicesNetwork #BAHVN #HearingVoices #Berkeley #PeerSupport #MentalHealth #HearingVoicesMovement

#MentalHealth #HearingVoicesMovement

Pinched is a beautifully strange 11-minute animation about a man who hears voices and has become remarkably functional while stricken by a profoundly dysfunctional relationship with them. Jack moves through an underground city as a gifted pickpocket, accompanied by entities that cajole, insult, command, and seemingly possess considerably more confidence about the direction of his life than he does. I can certainly relate to much of this and am sure many here can too.

Then something unexpected interrupts the arrangement: human connection.

A stolen object reconnects Jack with a woman from his past, and suddenly the unquestioned authority of his voices isn't so unquestioned anymore. The story becomes less about whether the voices are "real" and more about who gets to decide what Jack does next.

That distinction is probably the reason I'd recommend this to voice-hearers. The film gives the experience form without spending eleven minutes litigating its ontology. Jack's world is simply presented as Jack experiences it.

I do have one substantial HVN-ish criticism of it: the official synopsis ultimately frames love as defeating the voices and even as a "cure" for Jack's sickness. That's a fairly conventional psychiatric/redemption ending grafted onto a film that, for most of its runtime, is doing something much more interesting.

I'd rather read the ending as agency instead of cure.

Jack doesn't triumph because someone proves his voices aren't real. He discovers that their instructions aren't sovereign. There are other relationships, other motivations, and other possible ways of being in the world.

For an 11-minute cartoon, that's an unusually rich depiction of voice-hearing.

And visually it's fantastic, angular, grimy, exaggerated, vaguely noir, with Jack's internal experience bleeding naturally into the physical environment. It feels much closer to somebody attempting to show you what an experience feels like from inside it than making a clinical illustration of schizophrenia.

I suspect given the tone and candor of this short film that it was directed/made by people who've walked a very similar path to all of us here. In many ways this film proves and I hope shows you how surmountable this hellish affliction is.

Thank you for believing in yourself, love to see your thoughts!

Hey everybody, I hope you all have a fantastic week! Feel free to share down below how you’re doing!

The Angel of Death Striking a Door During the Plague of Rome by P. Noël after J. Delaunay. Illustrating human behavior as bicameral (all actions caused by the channeling of spirits).

Comment here (or make your own post if you have more to say) links or images of experiencing art. You're welcome to post anything that's related to hearing voices or other unique states of consciousness. "Experiencing Media" can be an illustration/painting made by you or anyone else (contemporary or classical), a song from one of your favorite artists mentioning hearing voices, a documentary, or even a recent episode of your favorite show; any art surrounding the lived experience of voice hearers and their unusual states of mind.

The idea is to share as much culture surrounding our lived experience as we can. Please share about the creators, the name of the artist, the title of the work, and what you personally identify with.