My Experience of (functional) Auditory Hallucinations...

I come from Sweden and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia seven years ago. I have been hearing voices most of the time and when it was most severe I heard ALL of my thoughts. That is I heard voices that were experienced as alien as well as my own voice (perceived as my own thoughts spoken out "loud" with different male, female or other strange sometimes "synthetic and gender neutral" voices. This is called "gedankenlautwerden"). When I don´t hear my verbal thoughts I´m normally aware of that I imagine the movements needed to produce different speech sounds thanks to the somatosensory feedback that make me feel the moves like the tip of my tongue or my lips touching when I covertly pronounce a phoneme that is produced like this during overt speech (, but according one source it´s my intention and not this experience that make me aware of that I produce covert speech) and at the same time I´m aware of where in my mouth different speech sounds would be produced. (If you only think slow enough you should be able to make the same observation and verify this experience, but I realise that I probably need to attend somatosensory stimuli more than other people because my internal auditory feedback system doesn´t work. The only verbal "thoughts" when I don´t experience this is when I read very fast and take in the words like pictures instead of sounds, but that is something else and something you usually don´t do during covert speech.) To me covert speech (verbal thoughts) and overt speech(when you talk) are very similar in this way. When my thoughts are alien and I hear them as an external or sometimes, although rarely, an internal voice I don´t feel the somatosensory feedback like always and only when I´m aware of the "formation" of the words and I´m not aware of where in my mouth different speech sounds would be produced. Finally if I hear what is percieved as my own thoughts I imagine how the words would be produced and the sensomotoric feedback that make me feel the moves is there, but still different speech sounds are percieved as coming from a source outside my head. A forth verbal experience I have had recently probably correlates to what people experience during thought insertion and the closely related (although not verbal) experience of alien control. Thought insertion is basically an alien voice with somatosensory feedback and when comparing my experience I assume that alien control means that you feel the somatosensory feedback without knowing the next move like if somebody else is guiding or controlling your moves. My determination to describe all these experiences has enabled a better understanding of what is going on and I want to share my experience and "understanding" of the voices I hear. (I started to hear voices when both my parents were seriously ill and later the same year died and because I have relatives with this illness I think that a combination of environmental and genetic factors contributed to the condition I´m in right now. First I believed that I had exceptional hearing maybe due to the nature of functional auditory hallucinations ( False voices integrated with external non verbal sounds like the pitch of distant voices impossible to hear objectively...) and the second time I lost the connection with reality it was different because then I also thought that it was some kind of mind control that made me hear voices. Now I´m "OK" and believe that my voices are my own thoughts heard out "loud" due to "abnormal" speech perception (and maybe that´s one reason why they have no names) and although this is only another way to understand my experiences it seems to work for me and maybe in time and with more knowledge it will give me all the answers I´m looking for? The voices I hear is probably simply what I imagine that other people would say although sometimes a bit distorted and hard to hear and often not very loud and more like distant voices.( I don´t recognise these voices from real life although two female and two male voices of the voices I hear are familiar and human like as auditory hallucinations. ) This is my approach when I hear voices and gradually I´m learning to deal with this, but it has not always been easy...."



I remember that my doctor who later did research about auditory hallucination in elderly people claimed that my hallucinations occurs in absence of a perceptual stimulus and this would make them different from verbal illusions, but I don´t agree. Is this how people like him understand my experience?: A real stimulus is responsible for starting the false perception, but is not the cause for the hallucinatory experience, merely an association?

Stefan


*(Edited to remove link that contains personal information)