![]() ![]() With Bracken’s help, Longden resolved to make sense of her voices. Behind the façade, though, was a mind torn apart by a “psychic civil war”. “It was a blasphemy,” she wrote of her abuse, “a desecration beyond expression and it left behind a tiny child whose mind broke and shattered into a million tiny pieces.” Longden grew into an academically successful, organised young woman who became adept at presenting a serene face to the world. Longden began to understand her voices as resulting from the horrific and organised sexual torture she had suffered as a small child. She had been brutalised by her experiences, and her psyche was struggling to adapt. After her grim days in hospital, she was seen by an enlightened psychiatrist, Pat Bracken, who helped her to understand her voices not as symptoms of disease but as survival strategies. Like countless others, Longden has benefited from the alternative framework of understanding that the Hearing Voices Movement has given her. One consultant psychiatrist told Longden that she would have been better off with cancer than schizophrenia, “because cancer is easier to cure”. Longden was urged to seek medical help, and her college doctor referred her to a psychiatrist – the beginning of a journey from a straight-A student to cowering, degraded psychiatric patient. The first voice that Longden heard was benign, commenting on her actions in the third person: “She is leaving the building.” “She is opening the door.” When Longden mentioned her voice to a friend, the beginnings of a positive relationship with the voice began to unravel. In Eleanor Longden’s gripping and heart-rending book, Learning from the Voices in My Head, based on her popular TED talk, she describes how her psychotic breakdown as a student led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, from which she was told there would be no recovery. The idea is antithetical to the traditional biomedical view from psychiatry, which has tended to see voices as neural junk, meaningless glitches in the brain – yet many people are now finding solace in this approach. The idea that voices can have profound human significance has deep roots, featuring, for example, in the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s argument that hallucinations contain a “germ of meaning” which, if identified accurately, can mark the beginning of a process of healing. Groups like this come together around a starting assumption that voices are meaningful, and that they convey valuable emotional messages. I have the sense that a life could be changing in front of my eyes. Julia is an old hand, but Margaret is in entirely new territory. Two elderly ladies, sipping tea and chatting about the voices in their heads. I see her deep in conversation with Julia, a writer of a similar age who has come to talk to us several times about her experiences. ![]() We are hosting the event with our special guest Jacqui Dillon, chair of the UK Hearing Voices Network and an old friend of our project.īefore Margaret came into this room, she had never met another voice-hearer. Apart from a couple of clinical psychologists and a few of us from the academic team, everyone gathered here in a conference suite at Durham University on a cold, sparkling spring afternoon, is a voice-hearer. She has come along today with her daughter, who is desperate for advice on helping her mother to cope with her frequent voices. The speaker is Margaret, a woman in her seventies with a bright, open face and a gentle smile. It sounds daft, but sometimes he says things that are really funny.”
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