Hearing loss among the participants ranged from mild to profound. Therefore, it was imperative that questions about auditory phenomena were appraised to create an accurate picture of their voice hallucinations."Īll the participants had a primary medical diagnosis of schizophrenia, had permanent deafness (either congenital or acquired) and clear recollection of their voice hallucinations over the past two years. Concepts such as 'loud' may be understood as being highly intrusive and difficult to ignore rather than as high auditory volume. Deaf people frequently use signs such as 'heard', 'shout', 'voices' and 'talk' without necessarily bestowing the auditory qualities assumed in English. This study breaks new ground by using more ecologically valid methodology to confirm that true auditory hallucinations were confined to deaf individuals who are some point in their lives had experienced hearing.ĭr Atkinson, who is herself a deaf British Sign Language (BSL) user, aimed to elucidate the variety of voice hallucination perceived by deaf people: "Particular attention was paid to deconstructing concepts that might be misconstrued as truly auditory to those unfamiliar with the subtleties of BSL and deaf conceptualisations of sound-based phenomena. However, the collection and interpretation of data had relied on non-native signers or hearing researchers using sign language interpreters. UCL's Dr Joanna Atkinson (Deafness, Cognition & Language Centre) has generated data from 27 deaf participants with experience of voice hallucinations, to try to determine how they experience the hallucinations, depending on the individual's hearing loss and language background.Įarlier research had suggested that born-profoundly deaf people might experience true auditory hallucinations. A new UCL study, published in the July 2007 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, systematically explores the perceptual characteristics of voice hallucinations in deaf people with schizophrenia for the first time.
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