as small as a world and as large as alone

3:46pm June 26, 2014

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

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”.)

I have always gotten the working on overdrive to find patterns in white noise thing, besides just hearing a lot of sounds that are really there which most people don’t pick up on. Partly, I think, because of not automatically filtering them out. That never worried me, because sensory sensitivity and not much gating like that isn’t unusual in my family, and nobody acted like I couldn’t be hearing stuff they weren’t. I remember one time my parents really did wonder what I was talking about multiple evenings in a row with awful squeaky noises that made my head hurt, and then noticed there were a bunch of bats flying around the streetlights very near the house catching bugs right after sunset. (I can’t hear them anymore, though I definitely could pick up some of it then.) Unlike in school, where I was apparently the only one getting bothered by things like buzzing ancient fluorescent light fixtures and getting a really bad response if I mentioned it.

But, when I was misdiagnosed as bipolar for years, I did worry that the white noise stuff might actually be auditory hallucinations. Not so much. By that point I knew better than to mention any of it to people who just didn’t get it and might freak out, however. :-| Besides the people who really do get auditory hallucinations, I have no trouble believing that a lot of other things like mentioned here get interpreted and treated that way.

Yeah when I was diagnosed as schizophrenic I wondered a lot about the white noise stuff.  And also about words that would appear in my head apparently unrelated to any thoughts I was having, usually antagonistic words and stuff – and then being told that was “the same as hearing voices” by a shrink, it got very confusing.

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