Schizophrenia Bulletin
August 8, 2018
T. M. Luhrmann, Ben Alderson-Day, Vaughan Bell et al.
74 citations
Trauma can contribute to voice-hearing but is not necessary for it. This article uses ethnographic and other data to show multiple pathways to voice-hearing in both clinical and nonclinical populations, excluding known causes like drugs or epilepsy. Trauma sometimes plays a major role, sometimes a minor role, and sometimes no role at all. Distinct phenomenological patterns in voice-hearing may reflect different salience of trauma for those who hear voices.
Oxford University Press eBooks
November 1, 2020
Albert R. Powers, T. Mcglashan, S. Woods
5 citations
Psychosis is typically preceded by a prodrome, which begins with nonspecific symptoms like anxiety and depression before more specific negative and attenuated positive symptoms emerge. Prospective diagnostic criteria, developed from retrospective studies, show high reliability in research settings. Individuals assessed as at clinical high risk (CHR) are five to seven times more likely to progress to psychosis than those not at risk, and they also experience functional and cognitive impairment and distress. CHR diagnosis rates are low in general epidemiology studies, supporting validity, but substantially higher in clinical epidemiology studies, indicating CHR is an important but often overlooked clinical entity. Several areas needing additional research are identified.
Brain Communications
January 1, 2026
Raina Vin, Jordan Galbraith, Rashina Seabury et al.
Hallucinations may arise from an over-reliance on prior knowledge during perception, potentially as a compensatory response to degraded sensory information. This perspective unifies visual hallucinations across Charles Bonnet syndrome, dementia with Lewy bodies, and psychosis within a Bayesian computational framework. In each disorder, sensory signal disruptions at different levels of the visual processing hierarchy produce hallucinations with distinct characteristics, reflecting the localization and overtness of the disruption. Discrete sensory disruptions in Charles Bonnet syndrome translate to hallucinations via known circuits, while different disruptions in dementia with Lewy bodies and schizophrenia lead to distinct phenomenology, comorbidities, and circuit involvement. This framework may help identify pathophysiologically distinct patient subgroups and guide new interventions.
Schizophr Bull
February 1, 2023
Tanya M Luhrmann, Ben Alderson-Day, Ann Chen et al.
In communities where hearing voices is common and expected, people are taught cultural models to identify and explain voice-like events. These communities share common features: they teach discernment to accurately identify the legitimate voice of a spirit or being, and they use two methods to enable experiencing spirits—trained attention to inner experience and repeated speech to the invisible other. The ability to hear spirits becomes more skilled with practice, and what is heard becomes clearer over time. Despite shared cultural ideas, individual variation in experience exists, some possibly reflecting psychotic process. Voice-like events may be shaped by cognitive expectation, trained practice, and an experiential pathway.