Hearing voice experience and its differential diagnosis

Contrary to general belief, voice hearing phenomena is not rare in the general population. Differentiation is essential, as it is experienced in a variety of psychiatric conditions as well as in non-clinical populations. For instance, literature report that voice hearing is experienced in dissociative identity disorder (DID), anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and psychosis. The present thesis aims to distinguish specific DID-related voice-hearers from other disorder-specific voice hearers. This study investigated the differential diagnosis of DID based voice hearing experience through measuring dissociation, childhood trauma, maladaptive daydreaming, and attention deficit levels. The final sample consisted out of 697 participants. Sample contained 18-65 years old general population. Convenience sampling method was used. Participants received six disorder-specific scenarios which are rumination-based, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)-based, anxiety-based, reasoning-based, psychotic-based and dissociative identity disorder (DID)-based. Dissociative Experiences Scale, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, and the Adult ADD/ADHD DSM IV- Based Diagnostic Screening and Rating Scale were applied to particiapnts. Chi-Square tests were performed to examine relationships between disorder-specific scenarios and socio-demographic characteristics. Results showed that statistical differences were found between participants who experience comorbid disorder-specific scenarios and those without regarding beforementioned scales. There were no statistical differences observed in non-comorbid disorder-specific scenarios in terms of scale scores. Results also indicated that dissociation, childhood trauma, maladaptive daydreaming are the risk factors to increase the probability of experiencing only DID-based voice hearing. In conclusion, this study found that some of the non-comorbid voice hearing experiences differentiated in the non-clinical population, and it is identified that distinguishing comorbid conditions from each other have some methodological difficulties. Future research should focus on how to advance the model of DID-based voice hearing in terms of comorbidity with other conditions.