Is schizophrenia an illness or do they really hear voices?
It is a mental health condition which leads people to experience voices. The cause has not yet been discovered, so we don’t know quite why this happens. It could be that there is a chemical imbalance in a part of the brain responsible for these experiences, for example, religious visions and experiences have been found to result from abnormal activity in the same region of the brain which may be affected by epilepsy. These people really do hear voices, but I would argue that they are not ‘there’ in the real sense of the word. The brain is making a faulty assumption. The most recent research on voices is very interesting, as it indicates that people’s relationships with their voi8ces relate to their relationships with people in their everyday lives. E.g. those with very good relationships with everyone around them are less likely to have abusive voices. The theories that surround the voices, e.g. they are the FBI or God, or the Devil etc, seem to be a way of explaining the phenomenon to
