Narratives of Voice-hearers
Luke Collins
CASS, Lancaster University
In this talk, I will introduce a new CASS project that explores first-person accounts of voice-hearers. Voice-hearing refers to the perception of voices that others cannot hear and is typically associated with mental health problems. However, there are also many people who experience voices that are not distressing. Using the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS), I present some initial observations of the key themes observed in the two corpora of interview data collected from: i) participants engaging with clinical services to help them cope with their distressing voices; ii) participants who self-identify as Spiritualists and view their experiences as communication with the spirit world. I offer some analytical observations of the ways in which the participants position themselves as agentive to demonstrate how a linguistic analysis of their accounts can help us to better understand their respective experiences.