UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lecture: Why are voices that others cannot hear so powerful?

Zsófia Demjén, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, will report on a study of how 10 voice-hearers, with diagnoses of schizophrenia, describe their interactions with their voices.

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UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lecture: Why are voices that others cannot hear so powerful?

08 Oct 2019, 13:00 – 14:00

Darwin Lecture Theatre
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

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About the lecture:
Voice-hearing is reported by approximately 70% of individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses, but a sizable minority cope well with such experiences. A key factor is the hearers’ perceptions of the power of the voices. In this talk, I report on a study of how 10 voice-hearers, with diagnoses of schizophrenia, describe their interactions with their voices. I show that the precise ways in which the voices attack or, more rarely, bolster, multiple aspects of the hearer’s sense of self are key to how the voices exercise power. I suggest how this kind of analysis might feed into existing therapies of voice-hearing.

This lecture is part of our October series of UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lectures in recognition of World Mental Health Day on Thursday 10 October 2019. The aim is to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilise efforts to support people with mental health issues.

Zsófia Demjén

Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics

UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics

Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics and specialises in language and communication around illness and healthcare (humour, metaphor, narratives, etc.). She is author of Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and the Experience of Depression (2015, Bloomsbury), co-author of Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A corpus-based study (2018, Routledge) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Metaphor and the Social World, and the BMJ’s Medical Humanities, among others.