This is a fascinating statement that I hope gets a future discussion:
"I have been treating schizophrenia for four years, yet I have never known what it really was"
Say I had a thyroid disorder and my doctor had been treating it for years, then they come down with the same disorder. I would find it odd if they said "I have never known what it really was" (until experiencing the symptoms themselves).
And what does the "really" add here?
(Imagine there is another disorder with the same symptoms; once they have those symptoms, do they only now know what those range of disorders really are?)
Your point is that the simulations don't show what auditory hallucination are really like. I wonder if there are some phenomenologically saturated disorders such that--like Mary and the color red--one can't know what it (really?) is unless one knows what it (really?) is like?
I taught a graduate seminar on phenomenological (with a dose of hermeneutics) psychiatry just this past semester largely because I hoped it would help me to understand exactly the issue that you have raised. I'm not ready to write about it yet, but definitely thinking about it.
These are excellent points. I will say, as an educator/psychologist who has used simulations like these in trying to convey to students a very brief experience of "hearing voices," the thing that many students take away from it is the accuracy of the symptoms description being "voices." For whatever reason, for people who have never experienced voice-hearing or may have limited experience with others in their lives who have, there is this weird disbelief that people who hear voices indeed hear voices (auditory stimuli) just like we all hear. It's not just a turn of phrase to describe verbal thoughts. I find utility in that, though of course a simulation would not need to be necessary in order to get that point across...
Thanks for this comment. I honestly hadn’t quite thought of that positive use of them before, but it makes sense.
Pursuant to the main point, it’s probably worth noticing that (according to some recent-ish phenomenological studies) something like the converse is also true — sometimes (according to these studies), a person’s voices are not quite phenomenologically the same as auditory perception, but they end up being understood that way because the traditional psychiatric description of AVH indicates that it is ‘percept-like’; this thought is offered to the patient (so the story goes) who latches on to it more because it is offered than because it is accurate.
(The 2024
Article by Humpston and Woodward in Lancet Psychiatry is the sort of thing mentioned above.)
This is a fascinating statement that I hope gets a future discussion:
"I have been treating schizophrenia for four years, yet I have never known what it really was"
Say I had a thyroid disorder and my doctor had been treating it for years, then they come down with the same disorder. I would find it odd if they said "I have never known what it really was" (until experiencing the symptoms themselves).
And what does the "really" add here?
(Imagine there is another disorder with the same symptoms; once they have those symptoms, do they only now know what those range of disorders really are?)
Your point is that the simulations don't show what auditory hallucination are really like. I wonder if there are some phenomenologically saturated disorders such that--like Mary and the color red--one can't know what it (really?) is unless one knows what it (really?) is like?
I taught a graduate seminar on phenomenological (with a dose of hermeneutics) psychiatry just this past semester largely because I hoped it would help me to understand exactly the issue that you have raised. I'm not ready to write about it yet, but definitely thinking about it.
These are excellent points. I will say, as an educator/psychologist who has used simulations like these in trying to convey to students a very brief experience of "hearing voices," the thing that many students take away from it is the accuracy of the symptoms description being "voices." For whatever reason, for people who have never experienced voice-hearing or may have limited experience with others in their lives who have, there is this weird disbelief that people who hear voices indeed hear voices (auditory stimuli) just like we all hear. It's not just a turn of phrase to describe verbal thoughts. I find utility in that, though of course a simulation would not need to be necessary in order to get that point across...
Thanks for this comment. I honestly hadn’t quite thought of that positive use of them before, but it makes sense.
Pursuant to the main point, it’s probably worth noticing that (according to some recent-ish phenomenological studies) something like the converse is also true — sometimes (according to these studies), a person’s voices are not quite phenomenologically the same as auditory perception, but they end up being understood that way because the traditional psychiatric description of AVH indicates that it is ‘percept-like’; this thought is offered to the patient (so the story goes) who latches on to it more because it is offered than because it is accurate.
(The 2024
Article by Humpston and Woodward in Lancet Psychiatry is the sort of thing mentioned above.)