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A friend passed this article to me. It highlights more of the work of Marius Romme and the Hearing Voices Network and also touches on the use of CBT therapy which is becoming an increasingly popular form of treatment in the UK. It's written by Daniel Smith, author of Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination

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<font size=4>Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?</font>

Angelo, a London-born scientist in his early 30s with sandy brown hair, round wire-frame glasses and a slight, unobtrusive stammer, vividly recalls the day he began to hear voices. It was Jan. 7, 2001, and he had recently passed his Ph.D. oral exams in chemistry at an American university, where, for the previous four and a half years, he conducted research into infrared electromagnetism. Angelo was walking home from the laboratory when, all of a sudden, he heard two voices in his head. “It was like hearing thoughts in my mind that were not mine,” he explained recently. “They identified themselves as Andrew and Oliver, two angels. In my mind’s eye, I could see an image of a bald, middle-aged man dressed in white against a white background. This, I was told, was Oliver.” What the angels said, to Angelo’s horror, was that in the coming days, he would die of a brain hemorrhage.

Terrified, Angelo hurried home and locked himself into his apartment. For three long days he waited out his fate, at which time his supervisor drove him to a local hospital, where Angelo was admitted to the psychiatric ward. It was his first time under psychiatric care. He had never heard voices before. His diagnosis was schizophrenia with depressive overtones.

Angelo remembers his time at the hospital as the deepening of a nightmare. On top of his natural confusion and fear over the shattering of his psychological stability, Angelo did not react well to the antipsychotic he’d been prescribed, risperidone, which is meant to alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia by reducing the level of dopamine in the brain. In Angelo’s case, the pills had a predominantly negative effect. His voices remained strong and disturbing — an unshakable presence, quiet only in sleep — while he grew sluggish and enervated. “If you think of the mind as a flowing river of thoughts,” he told me in an e-mail message, “the drug made my mind feel like a slow-moving river of treacle.” Several days into his stay, Angelo’s parents flew to the United States from London and took him back home.

More than six years later, Angelo still lives at his parents’ house. He currently takes a cocktail of antidepressants and antipsychotics, with tolerable side effects, and sees a psychologist every two months to monitor his medication. The pills help Angelo to manage his voices, but they have not been able to eradicate them. Shortly after his return to London, he made an attempt to resume his career, accepting a research position at the university where he had received his undergraduate degree. He lasted eight months (his neighbors heard him screaming at his voices and called the police), checked himself into the hospital for six weeks and returned home. Despite these setbacks, Angelo has maintained his optimism. He is eager to discover new ways to combat his voices. Not long ago, he found one. In November, his psychologist informed him of a local support group for people who hear voices, from which he thought Angelo might benefit. Angelo began to attend the group late last year.

Read the rest of the article here: Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?