From the mail bag

[libertango]

Not mine, but Cecil Adams':

"When a deaf person is also schizophrenic, do they hear people talking to them, or do they just imagine people signing to them?"

Yup, that's a stumper.

Comments

[davidlevine]

There's at least one documented case of a deaf person "seeing signs" rather than "hearing voices:"

"A deaf man was convicted of stabbing to death two of his classmates at Gallaudet University. At his trial, the defendant said that he was told to do it by mysterious black-gloved hands. His delusions did not come in the form of spoken language. He was told to commit these brutal murders through sign language--his mode of communication." Source: http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_5.htm

[(Anonymous)]

I used to be a psychiatric nurse working with Deaf people (native BSL users in the UK) and the it certainly seemed to be the case that people with psychotic illnesses reported experiences akin to "voices" even when they had no hearing (and had never heard, and had no spoken English).

BSL has a spacial gramatical structure rather that the linear grammer of most spoken languages and people reported experincing meaning rather than seeing sign.

Some people also experienced visual hallucinations but these rarely had a language component.

So one person, for example, would say they had seen their mother and that she had said "I hate you" - when they talked about it it was apparent that whilst their mother (also a BSL user) signed to them in the hallucination she hadn't moved.

This was rather confusing but very interesting in relation to where hallucinations come from.