Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Interview with Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Ph.D., Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), schizophrenia is defined as “a severe mental disorder, characterized by profound disruptions in thinking, affecting language, perception, and the sense of self. It often includes psychotic experiences, such as hearing voices or delusions. It can impair functioning through the loss of an acquired capability to earn a livelihood, or the disruption of studies.” The condition affects more than 21 million people worldwide. [1]
This is an area of mental health that Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department and speaker at Pacifica’s sold out Trauma and Transcendence conference in June 2018, has devoted much of her research. Her work focuses on the edge of experience of voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis.
Tanya uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about the mind and person, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, India; Accra, Ghana; and in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s also done fieldwork with Evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical space, and with people who practice magic.
How people interpret these experiences has differed significantly over time and in different cultures, Tanya says. Those who are very sick are often universally recognized as sick or schizophrenic regardless of culture or region, but people who are more on the healthy side of that continuum might have their experience interpreted in many different ways. “It’s quite possible that a clinician would say, well they have something like a story in the body, that looks like what I would call schizophrenia,” she says. “In the interpretive religious wing, another domain, they might be seen as if they were possessed by demons or might be seen as prophets.”
Only recently have mental health researchers and professionals looked at the content of these voices as something that should be studied and listened to, instead of insignificant side effects of the disorder, Tanya observes. “Psychiatric scientists used to think that these voices were just the side effects, the byproducts of the disorder, and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. You know, they were unreal yet very painful to people, but they were just the byproducts of the disorder.”
These days, however, researchers and mental health professionals are seeing some benefits to paying attention to the content of these voices. Dr. Luhrmann has been studying how one modern faction in Europe has been approaching voices in this way. “There’s now a new movement in Europe called the Hearing Voices Movement (HVM), and what they do is that they teach people to respect their voices,” she says. “They teach people with schizophrenia, paradoxically, to treat their voices as persons, to respect them as persons, and they find that some people are able to, in effect, persuade their voices to become more reasonable persons.”
For more information, visit:
DepthInsights.com
OR
InstitituteForSoulCenteredPsychologyAndCoaching.com
Interview with Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Ph.D., Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), schizophrenia is defined as “a severe mental disorder, characterized by profound disruptions in thinking, affecting language, perception, and the sense of self. It often includes psychotic experiences, such as hearing voices or delusions. It can impair functioning through the loss of an acquired capability to earn a livelihood, or the disruption of studies.” The condition affects more than 21 million people worldwide. [1]
This is an area of mental health that Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department and speaker at Pacifica’s sold out Trauma and Transcendence conference in June 2018, has devoted much of her research. Her work focuses on the edge of experience of voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis.
Tanya uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about the mind and person, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, India; Accra, Ghana; and in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s also done fieldwork with Evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical space, and with people who practice magic.
How people interpret these experiences has differed significantly over time and in different cultures, Tanya says. Those who are very sick are often universally recognized as sick or schizophrenic regardless of culture or region, but people who are more on the healthy side of that continuum might have their experience interpreted in many different ways. “It’s quite possible that a clinician would say, well they have something like a story in the body, that looks like what I would call schizophrenia,” she says. “In the interpretive religious wing, another domain, they might be seen as if they were possessed by demons or might be seen as prophets.”
Only recently have mental health researchers and professionals looked at the content of these voices as something that should be studied and listened to, instead of insignificant side effects of the disorder, Tanya observes. “Psychiatric scientists used to think that these voices were just the side effects, the byproducts of the disorder, and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. You know, they were unreal yet very painful to people, but they were just the byproducts of the disorder.”
These days, however, researchers and mental health professionals are seeing some benefits to paying attention to the content of these voices. Dr. Luhrmann has been studying how one modern faction in Europe has been approaching voices in this way. “There’s now a new movement in Europe called the Hearing Voices Movement (HVM), and what they do is that they teach people to respect their voices,” she says. “They teach people with schizophrenia, paradoxically, to treat their voices as persons, to respect them as persons, and they find that some people are able to, in effect, persuade their voices to become more reasonable persons.”
For more information, visit:
DepthInsights.com
OR
InstitituteForSoulCenteredPsychologyAndCoaching.com
