According to a new study, nearly 1 in 10 seven to eight-year-olds hear voices that are not actually there.
However, the team’s results showed that most children that hear voices do not find them troubling or disruptive to their thinking.
“These voices in general have a limited impact in daily life,” Agna A. Bartels-Velthuis of University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands wrote in an email to Reuters Health.
She added that parents with children that hear voices should not be too concerned.
“In most cases the voices will just disappear. I would advise them to reassure their child and to watch him or her closely.”
The researchers wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry that up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens might hear voices. They said that although hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders later in life, a big majority of young people that have these experiences never become mentally ill.
The researchers studied 3,870 Groningen primary schoolers. Each child was asked whether they had heard “one or more voices that only you and no one else could hear” in the past.
There were nine percent of the children that had answered yes to the question. Only 15 percent of these children said the voices caused them to suffer, and 19 percent said the voices interrupted their thinking.
Although girls were more likely to report suffering and anxiety due to the voices, boys and girls were equally likely to report having heard voices.
Bartles-Velthuis and her team found no link between complications in the womb during early infancy with the likelihood of hearing voices. She and her colleagues expected that hearing voices would be more common among urban children than among their rural peers, “but to our surprise, the contrary was the case in our sample. We have no explanation for this finding.”
The researchers found that although urban children were less likely to hear voices, they were more troubled by them when they could.
The team said that this greater severity suggests that the urban children who heard voices might be at higher risk of going on to develop psychotic illness.
The researchers are now conducting a five-year follow-up study of the children to see how the voice-hearing plays out and what effect it has on behavior.
—
On the Net:
Comments