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10:19am June 26, 2014

neuroatypicalprincess:

Auditory hallucinations are not an autistic thing right? I’m thinking most likely not but I need to rule this out to figure out why I’m hearing stuff

They’re not, but some autistic people have them.  Thomas McKean writes about them in his book Soon Will Come The Light.  And I’m really glad he does, because autistic people these days would not get away with writing things like that.  He got some crap for writing about it himself, people saying “that’s a psychotic thing, not an autistic thing”.  As if a person can’t be both.  (And as if hearing voices always means psychosis.)

But there are autistic things that are frequently mistaken for auditory hallucinations:

Auditory distortions due to things like central auditory processing disorder.  

Which can also include hearing words that aren’t there, because you work so hard to pick up words, that you pick them up out of things like white noise when there’s no words to pick up.  So if you only get your ‘hallucinations’ around white noise, then what you’re actually doing is trying to pick up word patterns that aren’t really there, and then hearing them as if they are there.

Hearing people talking in the far distance, much further than most people can hear.  Georgiana Thomas writes in her autobiography about getting diagnosed as psychotic until people figured out she was hearing the voices of people several rooms away from her in the institution she was in.

Also it’s normal to have auditory hallucinations while falling asleep or waking up from sleep, and some sleep disorders like narcolepsy can extend those into periods where you’re pretty close to wide awake.

It’s also normal to sometimes hear a voice calling your name.

Oliver Sacks wrote a fascinating book on hallucinations if you want to know more than you ever wanted to know about hallucinations.  He mostly focuses on non-psychotic hallucinations, but that’s a much bigger group of hallucinations than you’d expect.  (And psychotic is kind of a catch-all anyway for “we don’t really know what’s causing this”.)

Notes:
  1. kolokol1 reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  2. ajax-daughter-of-telamon reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I also do the thing where my brain works very hard to find words in white noise, and also music. I’m a lot more likely...
  3. flower--punk reblogged this from blueboxesinmaryland
  4. blueboxesinmaryland reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I have sensory processing disorder and I hear words in the static. I can hear vibrations too, from really far away and...
  5. withasmoothroundstone reblogged this from clatterbane and added:
    Yeah when I was diagnosed as schizophrenic I wondered a lot about the white noise stuff. And also about words that would...
  6. clatterbane reblogged this from autistichellspawn and added:
    I’m also remembering some study from a few years back where ISTR about 20% of the young people they asked said that they...
  7. autistichellspawn reblogged this from clatterbane and added:
    Wow that’s a relief. The white noise thing definitely happens to me. I also do get auditory hallucinations but they have...
  8. fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton reblogged this from clatterbane
  9. narciii reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    Another form I get that doesn’t strike me as particular psychotic is hearing words for things when I see them (or the...
  10. proletariangothic reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone