Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, an article to read about an intense new treatment being tested for people who hear voices. People who hear voices or experience psychosis are some of the most stigmatised people on this planet. They are also often being tormented by voices or visions that torture them daily. This trial is pretty revolutionary – it creates avatars of the cruel voices people hear and gets them to engage in conversation with them. And while that sounds risky for the people who are unwell to go through, it’s looking incredibly promising.
In the summer of 2019, when Joe was 21, he went on a university rugby tour of California. One night, one of his teammates bought some cannabis edibles to share, and Joe ate some. For the next 12 hours, he believed he was in hell. He was on fire; his body was suffused with pain. His ears were filled first with incoherent screaming and then with sinister whispering. Joe’s friends thought their teammate’s bad trip was funny, even as they wrestled him away from the windows when he tried to jump from the seventh floor of their hotel.
When he woke up the next morning, Joe was still in hell. A devilish, humanoid form lurking in the periphery of his vision was telling him he had died the previous night. A chorus of other voices joined in, wailing in agony. They were entirely real to him, even though he knew they couldn’t be. He had a rugby match to play, and 10 minutes in, he couldn’t see or feel his hands; he couldn’t move. His teammates laughed as he came off the pitch. Poor old Joe.
The voices came back to the UK with him. “You’re not real,” they told him incessantly. “You’re already dead, so it doesn’t matter if you end it all again.” He saw blurred, demonic faces smirking at him, sometimes at the edge of his eye line, sometimes up against his face, too close to be in focus.
Read the Guardian article by Jenny Kleeman here.
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