Auditory Hallucinations

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Title
A Literature Review of Deaf Patients with Psychotic Disorders Who Report Auditory Hallucinations

Authors
Amilcar A. Tirado, M.D., M.B.A. and Marieliz Alonso, M.D.

Abstract
Deafness is not a uniform phenomenon but exists to varying degrees, ranging from profound prelingual deafness, in which the person has had no experience of hearing sound at all (acquired prior to 3 years of age), to restricted hearing only in those frequencies required for verbal communication, to central auditory processing deficits in which a person has the full frequency range of hearing but cannot meaningfully process these sounds (1,2,3).

A deaf patient’s ability to communicate may be hampered by language dysfluency. The most common cause of language dysfluency in deaf patients is language deprivation due to late and inadequate exposure to American Sign Language (4). Language dysfluency can make it also challenging for health providers and sign interpreters to identify whether a deaf patient is experiencing psychosis as opposed to limitations with communication (5). Very few studies of the deaf …show more content…

When profoundly prelingually deaf people with psychosis report hearing voices, it is unlikely that they are referring to the same experience that hearing people with psychosis have, simply because they do not have the same framework for “hearing” (1). People with schizophrenia who are profoundly deaf from birth do not describe experiences of sound-based “voices” and cannot describe pitch, loudness, or volume characteristics of the “voices”. The subvocal articulation hypothesis suggests that auditory-hallucinations result from the misattribution of inner speech to an external locus of control (7). The subvocal hypothesis posits that the form of the hallucination mirrors subvocal thought processes, which in hearing individuals are predominantly speech-based

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