Hearing Voices: According to psychiatry, the field that knows most about it, hearing voices is typical of only two conditions — psychosis and multiple personality.

When Charles Dickens mentioned to someone that he heard the voices of his characters, he was accused of being crazy. But more than a half century later, after author interviews had become common, it was found that most authors hear the voices of their characters.

And surveys have found that a substantial minority of the general public hears voices, too.

So public opinion on hearing voices has gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas it used to be thought that hearing voices always meant that you were psychotic, now many people think that hearing voices means nothing in particular.

Whose opinion on this should you trust? Not academics (psychologists or philosophers). The discipline with most expertise on hearing voices is clinical psychiatry (and clinical psychology, etc.). Clinicians have been asking people “Do you hear voices?” for generations, and the results are in DSM-5, the latest edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual.

In short, hearing voices (auditory hallucinations) is typically found in two conditions: 1. schizophrenia (and other psychotic disorders), and 2. multiple personality (“dissociative identity disorder”), a nonpsychotic “dissociative disorder.”

Therefore, when nonpsychotic persons hear voices, the condition that they are most likely to have is multiple personality, in which the host personality hears the voices of alternate personalities.