Approximately one in four people can hear voices in their heads at some point in their lives, according to Eduardo Jesús Aguilar and his colleagues at the University of Valencia. These auditory hallucinations are especially common in people with schizophrenia. In these cases, the content of these voices is unpleasant, the experience is lived as a source of continuous and growing discomfort, and "the lives of patients are altered, affecting their functioning and their relationship with other people," as explained by the expert during the XVI National Congress of Psychiatry, which has just been held in Bilbao.
In this sense, cognitive-behavioral therapy applied to hallucinations or "voice therapy" has proven to be effective in reducing this discomfort. Specifically, it allows the patient to learn and apply useful strategies to ignore and distance themselves from the voices and their comments, thus reducing the intensity and frequency of the voices, as shown by images obtained through magnetic resonance imaging. Among other remedies, experts suggest humming or whistling a melody, reading a text aloud, listening to music, etc.
Researchers are also making an effort to improve society's understanding of this phenomenon and finally help those who experience voices, through the website 'Voces en la cabeza' (http://vocesenlacabeza.com) .
