Audible thoughts
General information
Audible thoughts, also called thought sonorisation, is a kind of auditory verbal hallucination. People with this hallucination constantly hear a voice narrating ones own thoughts out loud. This idea was first defined by Kurt Schneider, who included this symptom as one of the "first-rank symptoms" in diagnosing schizophrenia. Although the diagnostic reliability of "first-rank symptoms" has long been questioned, this idea remains important for its historical and descriptive value in psychiatry. Audible thoughts is a positive symptom of schizophrenia according to DSM-5, however, this hallucination is not exclusively found among people with schizophrenia, but also among patients of bipolar disorder in their manic phase. Types
Patients who experience audible thoughts will hear the voice repeating their own thoughts either as or after the thought comes into their minds. The first kind of audible thought, the voice and the thought appear simultaneously, was named by German psychiatry August Cramer as Gedankenlautwerden, a German word stands for "thoughts become aloud".Example of Gedankenlautwerden:
A 35-year-old painter heard a quiet voice with an Oxford accent. The volume was slightly lower than that of normal conversation and could be heard equally well with either ear. The voice would say, I cant stand that man, the way he holds his brush he looks like a poof.
"An important finding highlighted in this study is that studies done by the World Health Organization (WHO) have found that "developing countries (non-Western) experience far higher rates of recovery from schizophrenia than Western countries". The researchers further articulate that these findings may be due to culturally specific meaning created about the experience of schizophrenia, psychosis, and hearing voices as well as "positive expectations around recovery". Research has found that auditory hallucinations and hallucinations more broadly are not necessarily a symptom of "severe mental health" and instead might be more commonplace than assumed and also experienced by people in the general population. According to a literature review, "The prevalence of voice-hearers in the general population: A literature review", which compared 17 studies on auditory hallucinations in participants from nine countries, found that "differences in the prevalence of [voice-hearing in the adult general population] can be attributed to true variations based on gender, ethnicity and environmental context". The studies took place from 1894 to 2007 and the nine countries in which the studies took place were the United Kingdom, Philippines, United States, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and New Zealand. The same literature review highlighted that "studies that [analyzed] their data by gender report[ed] a higher frequency of women reporting hallucinatory experiences of some kind". Although generally speaking hallucinations (including auditory) are strongly related to psychotic diagnoses and schizophrenia, the presence of hallucinations does not exclusively mean that someone has a psychotic or schizophrenic episode or diagnosis.