Voices In Our Heads – Are We Going Nuts?

By James Donahue

A recent episode of Jessie Ventura’s third Conspiracy Theory television series suggested that secret government technology is being used to harass targeted people by putting strange voices in their heads.

Ventura interviewed Dr. Terry Robertson, a physician who claimed to be treating "a lot of patients lately" who complained they were being tortured by the voices. Robertson defined them as "targeted individuals." He said these people were not mentally ill, they were coming from all walks of life, and he considered the possibility that they were being subjected to psychotronic weapons developed for mass crowd control.

"These are people out there and apparently there’s thousands of them that are getting targeted by sounds waves in some way that’s putting voices in their heads and the symptoms are all the same for all of them – that’s the consistency," Ventura said.

Ventura’s team devotes the hour show to investigating the possibility that new technology is being used to cause this phenomenon, and thus presents it as a conspiracy theory. But the problem of people suffering from the voices in their heads appears to be occurring world-wide, and it has been affecting a lot of people for a relatively long time.

The mental health and medical community refers to the voices as auditory hallucinations. Clinical psychiatry has considered this as a schizophrenic disorder, a bipolar disorder or psychosis and treats patients who complain about the voices with medication – mostly tranquilizers.

Because the so-called "professionals" regard such complaints as a sign of mental illness, most people who suffer from the constant bombardment of voices in their heads suffer quietly, rarely speaking of it. Consequently we think this problem is more common than many people realize.

In fact there has been a Hearing Voices Movement going on throughout the world since at least 1987. It goes by various names ranging from Hearing Voices Network to INTERVOICE, which stands for The International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices. It has branches in the Netherlands, England, Italy, Finland, Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Israel, New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

INTERVOICE is a non-profit company headed by Marius Romme, one of the original founders of the movement in the Netherlands. The organization sponsors annual steering group meetings, encourages and supports exchanges and visits between member countries and the translation and publication of books and literature on the subject of hearing voices.

The Hearing Voices Movement claims to be seeking holistic health solutions to the voices when they become so alarming they cause mental distress. The research to date suggests that many people successfully live with their voices and some even consider them a spiritual gift.

INTERVOICE strongly opposes the psychiatric approach that labels it schizophrenia. One on-line document proclaimed this thinking an "unscientific and unhelpful hypothesis which should be abandoned."

So how loud do the voices get and do they contain specific messages to the hearer? We personally know of a person who lives with the voices and thus have received some interesting insight.

The voices are not constant. Most of the time they are a muffled and distant monotone like people sometimes hear when a neighbor’s radio is left on, or telephone connections get crossed. At other times the voices are louder and more distinct. Sometimes they sound like radio news reports. At other times they appear to be police radio conversations.

Sometimes the voices give alarming reports of severe events that have not happened, suggesting that they may be either a prophetic message from the future, or a total hoax by some outside source that is merely playing with this person’s mind.

The voices appear to be triggered by the sound of electric motors, fans, or the general hum made by refrigerators, computers or other household devices. Thus there is a distinct connection with electronics.

The good news is that the voices are usually heard in a distant mumble that is so weak the words cannot be made out. The person we talked to said the voices have become such a regular part of life that they can be ignored. The sounds of television, music, people talking or traffic can totally drown them out.