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Hearing voices: Listening to voice hearers outside the justice system

I read a book last weekend on the subject of hearing voices, titled "Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination," by Daniel Smith. Anybody who pays much attention to the justice system sees stories all the time, sometimes tragic, of people hearing voices, and this book offered a fresh, sympathetic perspective.The author had a personal motive for exploring the topic: His father and grandfather heard voices, though he and his siblings do not. For his father in particular, a successful Long Island attorney, it was a source of personal humiliation that he rarely discussed. While most people, myself included, associate voice hearing with schizophrenia, Smith says it can result from a number of different diagnoses and isn't well understood at all, in part because of "pathologizing" the phenomenon beginning in the 19th century...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on March 21, 2010 (boomark / email).