…or do they just see phantom hands signing messages at them?
I’m no expert, or even an amateur, on hearing or schizophrenia but I’m sure they perceive intrusive thoughts just as blind people hallucinate experiences that are not happening even though they can’t see. Not all schizophrenics hear voices even if they can hear.
For those that do experience hallucinations, some see hands, but as counter-intuitive as it might seem, others do apparently hear voices, or at least they describe them in ways that seem to correspond to the way a hearing person describes audio hallucinations. The problem is that it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are experiencing, because they can’t compare it to what a hearing schizophrenic experiences.
Deafness also isn’t a binary thing, where either you hear or you don’t. Some people do have total hearing loss. Some only have partial hearing loss. They might not be able to understand a conversation but they might be able to hear a car horn if it’s really loud and they happen to be standing right next to the car with their ear pressed up against the hood, for example. For all practical purposes they are completely deaf, but their brain has had the chance to process some sound signals. And some hear a lot better than that. It’s a spectrum.
From what I’ve read (and I am definitely not an expert on this subject) the auditory hallucinations of deaf schizophrenics at least somewhat tracks with the individual’s hearing ability and language development. Sign language isn’t just translating English words into signs. It has its own grammar and way of thinking behind it. Those who are completely deaf and have never learned proper English will “think” in sign language, and if schizophrenic, their hallucinations will be in a similar format.
- I never claimed all schizophrenics hear voices, but a percentage of them do.
- I am inquiring as to how schizophrenics that fall within that percentage that have never heard voices receive these phantom messages/communications.
edited to add: Thanks, e_c_g
People who were deaf from birth, or blind from birth, have a vary limited able to learn to hear/see when given corrective surgery. This suggests that whatever constructs they have for communication don’t translate directly into the mental constructs “speech” or “visualizations”.
Even normal hearing people don’t directly hear: hearing is mentally constructed, triggered by sound sensations. When your mind has developed the mechanism for creating hearing out of sound, the same mechanism can be triggered as a hallucinations. If you haven’t got, you won’t get that kind of hallucination.
I’ve read an old account, from before the introduction of anti-psychotics, when schizophrenics used to “deteriorate” and become institutionalized, about a patient who was only schizophrenic in English: he hadn’t used his French in years. In French conversation he was quite sane – but when that was exercised, quickly developed symptoms and mental failure.
I’ve ?read? or, more likely, heard quoted, a deaf person talking about the joy they felt seeing their baby form his first little words with his hands.
These things suggest to me that person experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations would be most likely to experience them in a well-developed mode of thinking, and that if that mode was associated with a form of sensation, then it would fit the normal meaning of the word “hallucination”, and if not, it would be a “mind disorder”.