Hearing voices can be positive Tasmania News - The Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania

Hearing voices can be positive Tasmania News - The Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania:

HELEN KEMPTON

September 01, 2009

A NETWORK is being set up to support the estimated 20,000 Tasmanians who experience auditory hallucinations.

Hearing Voices Network Australia soon will be operating in Tasmania under the auspices of Richmond Fellowship Tasmania.

Hearing voices was not always a symptom of mental illness, Richmond Fellowship Tasmania chief executive Patrick Carlisle said.

'In many cases, voices can be positive. There have been many famous high achievers who have contributed very significantly to society who have identified themselves as a voice hearer, including Leonardo da Vinci, Winston Churchill, Gandhi and (actor) Anthony Hopkins,' he said.

Research has found that about 4 per cent of the population hears voices but only 0.5 per cent of those are eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia."

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Working across the world to spread positive and hopeful messages about the experience of hearing voices

Hearing voices? You're not alone - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Hearing voices? You're not alone - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "Hearing voices? You're not alone
Aug 27, 2009 7

Hearing voices: New support groups are offering help for people who suffer from auditory hallucinations

Audio: More Australians seeking mental health help (AM) Audio: Hearing Voices network launched in Victoria (AM) Mental health researchers estimate that about 4 per cent of people experience auditory hallucinations, where they hear voices.

In Australia, the problem has typically been treated with medication. But a network of self-help groups that has been successful overseas is now gradually being rolled out around the country.

Janet Karagounis started hearing the voices of her imaginary friends when she was 8, but by her late 20s the voices were more sinister and she ended up in a psychiatric unit.

'Basically I had aliens, I had government conspiracies, every couple of years I basically was put in a psychiatric unit and I was first diagnosed chronic schizophrenic,' she said.

'That wrote me off so to speak. I had no hope, no future, no chance of working. And yeah, now my life is glowing.'

Ms Karagounis credits a Hearing Voices group for turning her life around and she's now a group facilitator."

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Working across the world to spread positive and hopeful messages about the experience of hearing voices

Man gets death for ‘02 killings`

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, February 12, 2009

Full story here


A judge issued a rare Fulton County death sentence Wednesday for a man convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s 12-year-old son and her grandparents in a fit of rage more than six years ago.

....The defense attorneys contend Martin is schizoprhenic because he reports hearing voices and hallucinates. But Lance Cross, one of the prosecutors, said there is no “credible evidence” Martin is mentally ill.

The unmedicated Martin shows no outward signs of schizophrenia and no cellmates or guards reported him hallucinating or hearing voices, Cross said.

Virginia Woolf: "I was fascinated by her hearing voices ..." New Dance By Lynne Taylor-corbett

Not Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

Groundworks Premieres New Dance By Lynne Taylor-corbett
By Michael Gill

"I feel certain that I am going mad again," Virginia Woolf wrote in her oft-quoted suicide note to husband Leonard Woolf. "I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came."

Suffering from what scholars have posthumously diagnosed as bipolar disorder, Woolf put an end to her own misery by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a river. The final hours of the great English novelist and essayist's life have long fascinated the acclaimed choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett, who is best known for work on Broadway shows like Chess and Swing, and movies including Footloose and My Blue Heaven. She spoke with Scene by phone from New York, where she was casting the dance company for a touring production of the Disney musical Tarzan.

"Virginia Woolf is, for some reason, an author that affected me when I was in my 20s," she says. "She's so much in our culture. I was fascinated by her hearing voices as her depression was coming on." Taylor-Corbett is in town this week for GroundWorks Dancetheater's premiere of her yet-to-be-named work, a fantasy based on the imagined final hours of the writer in the room of her own - a time during which she decided she couldn't go on living and drag her husband through her depression, but had the presence of mind and awareness of their mutual love to write such a cogent and heartfelt letter.

Full article, Clevelend Free Times, September, 2008

"She was suffering," the choreographer says, "but this woman was not insane."

It can be irritating to get a catchy song stuck in your head. Imagine if the music sounded so real that you were sure it was coming from a stereo

Interview: Music of the hemispheres

NewScientist.com news service

23 May 2008

Ewen Callaway

It can be irritating to get a catchy song stuck in your head. Imagine if the music sounded so real that you were sure it was coming from a stereo, and the tune never went away.
This is what it's like to suffer from musical hallucinosis, a mysterious condition that usually strikes elderly people with poor hearing. Ramon Mocellin, a psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia who treats patients with the disorder, tells New Scientist about the condition.

Are people with the condition mentally ill?

Hallucinations, which simply put are perceptions without a stimulus, can be symptoms of mental illness. Auditory hallucinations, in particular hearing voices, are one of the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia. It is, however, the nature of the hallucinations and the patient's understanding of them that point to the underlying problem.

In this group of patients, the experience of hearing music when there is no external source of music is often accompanied by some degree of understanding that these experiences are not "real", that they originate from their own mind. In schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses, hallucinations are experienced as real, in the external world.

Unfortunately, as most people would equate hearing or seeing things that are not there with mental illness, many people with these symptoms do not seek help because of the shame and stigma that continues to surround mental illness of any type.

Full article here