Do the voices ever go away?

Thank you caregiver1, for the thought about nutrient therapy, I try to look into as much as I can about different treatments and ideas. I’m thinking event with covid if your able maybe get out for a walk if you can and if you can by yourself. Please take care of yourself also. Don’t be angry at your self for learning something, we don’t come out of the womb knowing everything. Your keeping your mind open to learning new things all in the hope to heal your loved one, I think that makes you pretty awesome in my book.

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Thank you, I appreciate the support. Reading other ppls posts I’ve realize he’s been bipolar or schizophrenic for a long time, he just wasn’t hearing voices back then.

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Angelakay,
When I think back, my daughter was exhibiting signs also. But I had no clue about any of this till now. Same as you no voices back then. Wish we still didn’t know anything about it. Let us know how things work out for you with the doctors.

Hi @Angelakay,
Our son’s therapist who specializes in psychosis told me once that when someone starts telling her about a delusion, she can finish it for them in her mind. She said there are so many that are identical like preparing for a war, being on a game show, electronics being bugged and on and on.
I find this absolutely fascinating. How can this illness tap into unique brains to produce the exact same delusions? There is so much that is unknown and I really feel that psychiatrists and researchers need to pay attention to this sort of thing if there is to be advancement in treatment.
My soapbox for the day :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you for the reply, I also thought it was fascinating until my son got sick; I was a social work major in college and psychiatry always intrigued me. Even before he got sick I was following the work of dr bill walsh; he has 30 plus yrs of research w mental illness and I know from his research and my own mental illness ten yrs ago that it’s induced by environmental toxins and poor nutrition but trying to get my son to give up processed food and eat lots of organically grown produce is impossible.

I tried to get him to read an article last night and he kept telling me the voices are real and he’s not schizophrenic. His latest is clicks in his tongue; in addition to the radio I’ve allegedly installed in his head he now has sensors in his tongue.

I think he’s been schizophrenic for many years but I didn’t realize it until the voices started. My mom passed in the fall of 2018 right after his gf and mom of his third child cheated on him and left, then covid struck and all the uncertainty of our future it brought along w hard drug use and him pounding his head into the floor until his eyes are black followed. It’s been enough to almost send me over the edge so I can’t imagine what it’s done to folks w mental illness. The voices seem to always be talking about sex and cheating so I’m certain it correlates to his gf cheating on him.

How do we convince them that they’re sick and they need help? The hospital saw his black eyes from head pounding, the burn pattern all over his hands and still sent him home within an hour of police dropping him off in the er. I called police bc he was destroying everything in the house and had ripped his front door off it’s hinges. He’s not doing street drugs now but went to a suboxen clinic so imo he’s still using and still poisoning his body.

Last night he was manic and I got about four hours sleep and he got none and passed out from sheer exhaustion a few hours ago. I’m enclosing a link to that article as I thought it was interesting, I wondered if head trauma could have induced the voices bc the article says that the frontal cortex sends a signal to the auditory cortex. Psychologist: Persons with schizophrenia believe their inner voices in their heads are strangers

[

Psychologist: Persons with schizophrenia believe their inner voices in their heads are strangers

Everybody hears his inner voice in his head. However, people with auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia believe it is the voice of a stranger. Dr. Łukasz Gawęda speaks in an interview with PAP about the psychological determinants of hallucinations

](https://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news%2C405977%2Cpsychologist-persons-with-schizophrenia-believe-their-inner-voices-in-their-heads-are-strangers.html)

How long has your son been in a group home? To me that is the most amazing thing to hope for. A place where your son can be taken care of without him having to live with you and ruin your life…
My brother is 56 now. He was diagnosed at age 22. He was approved for a group home after one of his many hospitalizations back in his 20’s. He refused to go!
You are very lucky that your son is there.

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Merci beaucoup. pour votre réspons.

Thank- you for you response.

I deeply appreciate this site and all the
SZ.com Community who share their sorrows here.

I live near French- speaking Quebéc, Canada
French is very prevalent here and worldwide.

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Much of this introduction is untrue in my research and experience. It’s an oversimplification and to my mind flat-out wrong. Not sure about the study, but the author of the intro has outdated information or has done poor research.

There are rare people who have no “inner speech” at all, and the experience of an ‘inner monologue’ varies greatly. Like many things, it’s now considered a spectrum. I came across a video on the subject with Hank Green after learning of this phenomenon some time ago. I’ll hunt up a link and add it with an edit.

Per voices being “strangers”, I’ll say some are some aren’t. Once they are “known” they aren’t strangers. Some maybe mishearings of people you know, be them present or not, or voices of people long dead or far away or even celebrities. I’m frankly a bit insulted by this reductive explanation. The experience is quite hard to explain, but for me this isn’t it chief.

Here’s the video:

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Jung’s theory is delusions are expressions of the Collective Unconscious which is a word he coined for a shared well of patterns, stories and symbols which crosses societies and generations.

It’s related to the work of Joseph Campbell who explored the monomyth cycle and other recurring tales retold by cultures across the world for millennia. Most famously it’s the Hero’s Journey where a hero goes on an adventure, faces a crisis and succeeds, then returns victorious, but also creation and flood and other myths. George Lucas was famously inspired by his work when creating the Star Wars saga.

The theory goes that the conscious ego of people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is less able to keep unconscious forces of the psyche at bay and these shared patterns spill out. Through analysis, his premise is that balance can be restored or improved and these unconscious forces are tamed and the analyzand returns to wellness. This takes on the structure of the hero’s journey, and is sometimes thought of as the shaman’s path. This a gross oversimplification of Jung’s work, and it’s not without its flaws, hence there’s now a branch of psychology and neuroscience called post Jungianism.

In my experience delusional stories are often very similar, but differ in the details, even in retellings by the same person. I tend to look at it more as theme and variation, and less that delusions repeat, but more that they rhyme. How this manifests is anyone’s guess. If it’s structures in the brain or neural patterns or “software” that make up the psyche. There’s much that’s unknown, but researchers working with artificial neural nets in machine learning (so-called Artificial Intelligence) report similar effects when these systems go awry.

Gross oversimplification or not, I really like this. It does seem to be a journey, and couched in terms like a hero conquering long odds seems an apt metaphor for those struggling to return to wellness. The more I am on the sidelines of this, the more I observe the benefits of esteem building experiences (job, volunteer work) and the hard work of therapy (managing mood and emotions and expectations). I wonder why fear is such a dominant part of psychosis; but to me that makes the journey all the more heroic. I can’t imagine navigating all this while being fearful.
For some reason your note reminded me of the Odyssey. And I was remembering how at the end Odysseus takes an oar and travels inland until he is so far removed from the coast (the site of his war/tribulations) that no one knows what an oar is. Then he knows his journey is complete.
Thanks MB for this. There is so much suffering with this illness, and viewing it through a different lens provides a more comprehensive picture.