People with schizophrenia may hear either hostile voices goading them to jump off a bridge or a mother’s soothing words of advice, depending on the cultures in which they live, a new study suggests.
In the United States, schizophrenia’s symptoms include hallucinations of disembodied voices that hurl insults and make violent commands, says an international team led by Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. But in India and Ghana, schizophrenia patients often report positive relationships with hallucinated voices that they recognize as those of family members or God. The findings will be published in the January 2015 British Journal of Psychiatry.
“Learned cultural expectations about the nature of mind and self may encourage Americans with schizophrenia to pay more attention to negative, hostile voices,” Luhrmann says.
