Soundless voices, silenced selves: are auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia truly perceptual?
In much contemporary psychiatric training and practice, there is a strong emphasis on the audible or perceptual quality and externality of auditory verbal hallucinations in clinical assessments. A typical question during clinical assessment is asking whether the voices that a person hears sound identical to the way the clinician’s voice is heard. In this Personal View, we argue that the most important factor in auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia spectrum psychoses is a loss of first-person authority, and that a perceptual quality is not required for it to be this kind of hallucination.