Auditory hallucinations are not just limited to hearing voices and can affect anyone. They can be caused by various conditions such as drug use, epilepsy, and dementia. Some people believe that they are a normal part of human behavior and should not always be treated as a mental illness. However, they can indicate serious behavioral problems and should be investigated by a doctor.
Auditory hallucinations are often described as hearing voices that don’t exist. This definition is not entirely accurate. While hearing voices does occur in some people who experience these hallucinations, there are other sounds, or tones, that a person might hear instead. Similarly, there is a tendency to assume that only people with schizophrenia hear these variable noises, and this is definitely not true.
If the definition of auditory hallucinations is expanded to include hearing all sounds that are not there and includes anyone who can experience them, it could be said that many people have had an auditory hallucination at least once. They can occur in conditions such as hypnopompic hallucinations, where just before waking up, a person hears a very real sound or voice, and these can affect over 10% of the population at least once in their life. Also, some people suffer from exploding head syndrome, where just when people fall asleep they hear loud popping or popping sounds, which can be extremely annoying and disrupt sleep.
There are other clinically defined causes of auditory hallucinations. They have been associated with the excessive use of drugs, especially crack, amphetamines and cocaine. Other conditions that can cause them include alcohol withdrawal, some forms of epilepsy, a variety of diseases that cause dementia, high fever, and some forms of poisoning.
It is true that some people who experience auditory hallucinations suffer from conditions such as schizophrenia or some severe forms of depression. The voices heard can be negative or positive, and some people respond to these voices by speaking out loud. Medications to treat these symptoms, in the form of antipsychotic drugs, may be effective for some people. It may still leave a residue of “talking within,” but with better disease control, some individuals may ignore the voices they hear.
Interestingly, there are some people who believe that auditory hallucinations that occur regularly are not necessarily a symptom of disease, but instead fit them into an acceptable range of human behavior. The organisation, the Hearing Voices Movement, originally founded in England, takes a much more holistic approach to this problem, suggesting that psychiatry has not been fully effective in solving this problem for people labeled schizophrenic and that some people may be better treated with other methods.
No matter how auditory hallucinations are viewed, they are a condition that deserves some investigation. Depending on the approach, they may not be diagnosed as a mental illness and in fact hearing noises may simply be seen as a common variation of the human experience. This is no reason to take “things to hear” lightly; as this condition could indicate the presence of serious behavioral problems such as drug addiction, possibly seizure disorders, or the development of conditions causing cognitive impairment. Those suffering from any form of hallucinations are advised to speak to a doctor promptly.
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