“On finishing this book my initial instinct was to re-read it in order to appreciate its insights for a second time. Can’t You Hear Them? is not only a work of impressive scholarship but a compelling, beautifully-written story of human experience and endeavour.”
Dr Eleanor Longden
This book has been written by Simon McCarthy-Jones and is subtitled “The Science and Significance of Voice Hearing”. The publishers say:
“The experience of ‘hearing voices’, once associated with lofty prophetic communications, has fallen low. Today, the experience is typically portrayed as an unambiguous harbinger of madness caused by a broken brain, an unbalanced mind, biology gone wild. Yet an alternative account, forged predominantly by people who hear voices themselves, argues that hearing voices is an understandable response to traumatic life-events. There is an urgent need to overcome the tensions between these two ways of understanding ‘voice hearing’.
Simon McCarthy-Jones considers neuroscience, genetics, religion, history, politics and not least the experiences of many voice hearers themselves. This enables him to challenge established and seemingly contradictory understandings and to create a joined-up explanation of voice hearing that is based on evidence rather than ideology …”
You can find out more from here and here.
