From the Mental Elf - Hearing voices: experiences of children and young people #CAMHScampfire

"Many of us hear voices that no-one else can hear. The experience of hearing voices is unique and different for every individual. As the Understanding Voices website tells us, for some “the voices can be comforting, kind and encouraging; for others, the voices are intimidating, critical and abusive” (Understanding Voices, 2018).

There is a lack of user-focused research on children and young people (CYP) who hear voices. Most of what is known comes from adult studies. Exact figures on lifetime prevalence are hard to find, but recent Dutch research suggests that figures are similar in children (12.7%) and adolescents (12.4%), but these two groups differ significantly from the adults (5.8%) and the elderly (4.5%) (Maijer et al, 2018).

So the experience of hearing voices is about as common for young people as having asthma, but of course it is not viewed by many people in society as a ‘normal experience’."

Conclusion

The two most striking take-homes are:

"The study shows that hearing voices has an impact beyond those with a clinical diagnosis

Hearing voices can have positive impacts as well as negative (but for more than half of participants, it was the latter).

We might therefore expect that stigma-reduction measures could reduce voice-related distress. Another approach would be to help young people develop the skills to contextualise the voices they hear, and understand their origin.

Although, as noted in the study, this would be easier to achieve with positive voices than negative ones, which were harder to control. There may be feedback loops at work in the interaction of mental distress and hearing the negative voices. It seems that here is the most urgent need for further research work.

The research platform itself shows promise as a way of engaging with participants who may not want to contribute face-to-face for whatever reason. Indeed, the participants themselves said as much:

"This survey helped me get my feelings out. Thank you for giving me a place to talk openly about my experiences!""

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