I have only heard voices once. I was babysitting at a house where I would often spend the night if the parents were going to be out late. The children were asleep, the parents were still out, and I was lying in bed, and I could hear people, in the room, discussing me. Discussing me in very cold, contemptuous tones. “Look at him. What an idiot. He can’t even see us.” It was so profoundly disturbing—a precisely accurate term in this case—that it bubbled up years later in this book.
I can only imagine though what it would be like to hear voices more often. And that’s what I have tried to do in Whisper to Me—to imagine it, and imagine how it could be conquered.
Because these kinds of illnesses—or traumas—can be conquered. That’s something I don’t have to imagine, since for a number of reasons and in a number of ways I have had close and direct experience of mental illness for a large part of my life. And I know, for an absolute fact, that people can get better. Things can get better. Life can get better.
Estimates vary, but statistics reported by the Mental Health Foundation put the proportion of teenagers suffering from some kind of mental problem at around 10 percent. It’s not unusual, it doesn’t make you weird—it’s very common. And it is extremely important to know, if you happen to be one of those teenagers, that help is available—and it works.
Never listen to any kind of voice inside you that says things will not get better.
Things can get better, and with help, they will.
In the United States:
National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org)
The Hearing Voices Network USA (www.hearingvoicesusa.org)
In the United Kingdom:
MIND (www.mind.org.uk)
Hearing Voices Network (www.hearing-voices.org)
The techniques used by Dr. Lewis in this fictional work are similar to those employed by the Hearing Voices Network, a support organization inspired by the academic research of Professor Marius Romme and Sandra Escher. They have coauthored several fascinating books on the subject, including the seminal Accepting Voices.
In real life, as in the novel, there is some tension between this approach—which stresses the roots in trauma for much voice hearing and the practical tools that can be employed to deal with it—and the psychiatric one. However, this is Cassie’s story: it isn’t intended to present my or anyone else’s view on that debate, and I hope that it gives as balanced a perspective as possible. It also goes without saying that Cassie, Dr. Lewis, Dr. Rezwari, and all the characters in this book are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.