A Life Interrupted Nothing Is As It Appears

In my last post I provided a description of what hearing voices can be likened to for the uninitiated’s apprehension of the experience. In this post I would like to further discuss hearing voices by focusing on a specific voice that has haunted me since the voices became more intense in 1994. Specifically, I refer to what I call the die command.

The die command is a voice that commands me to die. The command is the essence of simplicity.  The voice simply tells me, or a part of me, to die. The voice says nothing else to me, just the word “die,” and I hear the command in the same way I hear other voices.  The voice wants me dead and, as mentioned above, began in 1994.  Since then the die command has been with me off and on for 20 years.  Sometimes I go for weeks or even months without hearing it and then I go through days and weeks where I hear the command throughout the days on a regular basis. The command seems directed at a part of me that I am not always aware of but is usually received with a literal physical response in the form of a despairing snort that escapes my mouth that I cannot control.  In the past, the command has prompted me towards suicidal thoughts, thoughts which obviously I did not in the end act upon. read more

In my experience of schizophrenia the active symptoms are or were delusions, voices, hallucinations, and, to a much lesser extent, suicidal thoughts. While the voices and hallucinations persist to this day, the delusions were perhaps the most difficult to grapple with but were the first to go, and suicidal thoughts that were brought on by despair passed when the feelings of despair passed. The hallucinations proved to be of little or no consequence in my experience being similar to the hallucinations brought on by the street drugs I ingested in my youth, but the voices continue to be a part of nearly every waking day to one degree or another. I would like to talk about the voices here and leave the rest to another day. read more