Hearing
voices can affect more than a fifth of young adolescents, a psychiatry study
has found.
 |
Hearing
voices can affect up to a fifth
of young adolescents, according to
a new
psychiatric study
|
Researchers
discovered auditory hallucination has an impact on 21% to 23% of children aged
between 11 and 13 in Ireland.
More than
half of those who heard voices - 57% - were also found to have a psychiatric
disorder following clinical assessment.
Nearly
2,500 children, aged between 11 and 16, were assessed four times for the study,
funded by the Health Research Board (HRB).
Lead
researcher Dr Ian Kelleher revealed auditory hallucinations can vary from
hearing an isolated sentence now and then to hearing conversations between two
or more people lasting for several minutes.
"It
may present like screaming or shouting and other times it could sound like
whispers or murmurs," said Dr Kelleher, of the Royal College of Surgeons
in Ireland (RCSI). "It varies greatly from child to child, and frequency
can be once a month to once every day."
The study
showed auditory hallucinations stop for many children as they get older, with
7% of older adolescents (aged 13-16) hearing voices. However nearly 80% of the
teens who continued to hear voices also had a psychiatric disorder, linking
auditory hallucinations and serious mental illness.
The
research has been published online by the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Professor
Mary Cannon said it suggests hearing voices seems to be more common in children
than was previously thought."In most cases these experiences resolve with
time," the HRB clinician scientist at the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital said.
"However, in some children these experiences persist into older
adolescence and this seems to be an indicator that they may have a complex
mental health issue and require more in-depth assessment."
Dr Kelleher
said hearing voices could be a "blip" on the radar that does not turn
out to signify any underlying or undiagnosed problem.
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