People’s voice-hearing experiences are shaped differently by their respective cultures, according to a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann led the analysis of interviews with 60 culturally-diverse people who’d been diagnosed with serious psychotic disorders. “The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and evidence of a sick condition,” stated a Stanford press release about the study. “The Americans experienced voices as bombardment and as symptoms of a brain disease caused by genes or trauma.”
Luhrmann said in the press release that American clinicians “sometimes treat the voices heard by people with psychosis as if they are the uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease which should be ignored. Our work found that people with serious psychotic disorder in different cultures have different voice-hearing experiences. That suggests that the way people pay attention to their voices alters what they hear their voices say. That may have clinical implications.”
Hallucinatory ‘voices’ shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says (Press Release, Stanford University, July 16, 2014)
Differences in voice-hearing experiences of people with psychosis in the USA, India and Ghana: interview-based study (Luhrmann, T. M. et al. British Journal of Psychiatry. Published online ahead of print June 26, 2014, doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.113.139048)