In a qualitative study of 57 self-identified Māori participants subcategorized within one or more of the following groups including: "tangata Māori (people seeking wellness/service users), Kaumatua/Kuia (elders), Kai mahi (cultural support workers), Managers of mental health services, clinicians (psychiatrists, nurses, and psychologists) and students (undergraduate and postgraduate psychology students)", researchers interviewed participants and asked them about "[1] their understanding of experiences that could be considered to be psychotic or labelled schizophrenic, [2] what questions they would ask someone who came seeking help and [3] they we asked about their understanding of the terms schizophrenia and psychosis". The participants were also people who either had worked with psychosis or schizophrenia or had experienced psychosis or schizophrenia. In this study, researchers found that the participants understood these experiences labelled "psychotic" or "schizophrenic" through multiple models. Taken directly from the article, the researchers wrote that there is "no one Māori way of understanding psychotic experiences". Instead, as part of understanding these experiences, the participants combined both "biological explanations and Māori spiritual beliefs", with a preference for cultural and psychosocial explanations. For example, 19 participants spoke about psychotic experiences as sometimes being a sign of matakite (giftedness). One of the Kaumatua/Kuia (elders) was quoted as saying:"I never wanted to accept it, I said no it isnt, it isnt [matakite] but it wouldnt stop and in truth I knew what I had to do, help my people, I didnt want the responsibility but here I am. They helped me understand it and told me what to do with it.
He immediately experienced whatever the voice was saying as his own thoughts, to the exclusion of all other thoughts.And the second kind in which the voice comes after the thought appears is called echo de la pensée in French, namely thought echo.Example of thought echo:
A 32-year-old housewife complained of a mans voice. The voice would repeat almost all the patients goal-directed thinking, even banalest thoughts. The patient would think I must put the kettle on, and after a pause of not more than one second the voice would say I must put the kettle on.If categorized by patients subjective feelings about where the voices come from, audible thoughts can be either external or internal. Patients reporting an internal origin of the hallucination claim that the voices are coming from somewhere inside their body, mainly in their own heads, while those reporting an external origin feel the voice as coming from the environment. The external origins vary in the patients description:  some hear the voice in front of their ears, some attribute the ambient surrounding noise, like running water or wind, as the source. This sometimes influences patients behaviours as they believe people around them can also hear these audible thoughts, therefore they may avoid social events and public places to prevent others from hearing their thoughts. Besides, study suggests that the locus of the voice may change as the patients hallucinations develop.