Auditory Hallucinations or Clairaudience?
Clairaudients Misdiagnosed, ICD-10, DSM-IV TR & Transpersonal Psych
Apr 27, 2009
Joan of Arc is a well known example of a clairaudient. She heard saints’ voices tell her it was her divine duty to free France from the English.
She was captured, sold to the English, convicted of witchcraft and heresy and burned at the stake. While society has changed since then, people are being misdiagnosed as having a psychiatric disorder when they’re having extraordinary human experiences.
Auditory Hallucinations
Sensory and sleep deprivation, medications and drugs can cause hallucinations. These can also be a criterion for schizophrenia, a psychosis, a serious psychiatric disorder. Schizophrenic hallmarks also include delusions, irrational thinking and abnormal behavior.
There are four types of auditory hallucinations:
- Second person - Are those in which a person is called “you” or is told do something. “You are going to feel sick.” “Hurt your dog.” In depressive psychosis the words are derogatory. “You are disgusting.”
- Third person - Those in which a person hears the voices talking about him or herself. “She’s no good.” They can also describe what the person is doing. “He’s eating.” This can also happen in mood disorders such as bipolar.
- Echo de la pensée: A person hears voices that echo thoughts after the person had them.
- Gedankenlautwerden: The voices anticipate what a person is about to think or is thinking.
Clairaudience
Psychic phenomena or extraordinary human experience are manifested in different ways. It’s theorized that each of the five traditional senses have psychic counterparts. “Clair” means clear. Clairvoyance is psychic seeing. Clairaroma is smelling; clairgustus, tasting. Clairsentience is a bodily sensation or touch.
Voices or music can be heard by the ears or within a person’s head. It’s common for bereaved people to hear the voice of the recently deceased. Animals have exhibited clairaudience.
Clairaudience or Psychosis? ICD-10 Versus DSM-IV TR and Transpersonal Psychology
In many European countries, mental health professionals use the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) as a diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders.
This handbook doesn’t have a diagnosis regarding religious or spiritual disorders, so there’s a risk to be misdiagnosed with a psychosis when it may be a case of a clairaudience.
Transpersonal psychology is the only school of psychology that studies the psychic and spiritual aspects of the human experience. It overlaps with parapsychology, the scientific study of psychic phenomena done without bias, but differ in that the focus on the spiritual. Parapsychology concentrates on laboratory experiments, statistics and field work.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV TR, (DSM-IV TR) published by the American Psychiatric Association, recognizes religious or spiritual Problems. It’s the reference that mental health professionals use to diagnose for billing purposes. Mystical, meditation, near death, visionary, auditory and Shamanic kinds of problems have been associated with Spiritual Emergences Experience, SEEs, where a person has difficulty functioning.
The most important undertaking is giving experients a positive and supportive framework for their experiences and information about what they’re going through. Therapy should allow them to fully experience and release negative emotions.
It’s necessary to respect the wisdom of the transformational process and to honor and accept the entire range of human experience. Interventions with family and friends can help with a short term crisis. Sometimes, intensive long time psychotherapy is needed. The choice of therapy depends on the intensity, longevity, type of spiritual problem and also on the individual and his or her support network.
Related Reading
Readers may also enjoy learning about Psychotherapists and Psychic Phenomena, along with Spiritual Emergence Experience, SEE and What is Receptive ESP?
Sources:
- Between Two Worlds, Nandor Fodor, (Parker Publishing Company, 1964).
- Psychology, Fourth Edition, Carole Wade and Carol Travis (HarperCollins College Publishers, 1966).
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