Somewhere on the net, brokenthoughts, I recall reading the words of one doctor who stated "schizophrenics listen to loud music to drown out the voices". Perhaps that's true for some individuals, but it certainly wasn't true for me. In fact, that had nothing to do with why I was listening to music.

I can't say reading those words made me want to barf, but it did serve to remind me that people -- and this is true of all people, not just the kind of people who are doctors -- will often try to understand why something has happened or is occurring. When it comes to understanding the experience of psychosis and/or schizophrenia, the person with the answers is most often the person having the experience. There will probably be some common factors but no experience is a cookie cutter of someone else's. I listened to music because music served as my guide out of that experience. I listened to music because it expressed a quality of what I was going through that I could not put into words. And I listened to music so I could hear the voices, not drown them out. As always, individual mileage varies.