Can Changes To Hearing Be Psychological

Do people who talk about "hearing voices" (psychological condition) literally hear them? Can they be discerned from regular human speech?

So, there's "auditory hallucinations" - where you hear voices or sounds, and the processing in your cerebral cortex as examined under FMRI is identical to what you'd expect if you were actually hearing the sounds. Then there's "auditory COMMAND hallucinations" - where the voices in your head are telling you to do things. That's the scary part which gets you into one of those funny jackets with the really, really long arms (not to say that unexpected hallucinations, auditory or otherwise, aren't scary to the person experiencing them, I've had my share and know the drill).The literature on auditory command hallucinations indicates that persons suffering from them really believe that an unseen voice is providing them with instructions. That's sort of the problem - you're hearing a voice, in your head, which you can't tell is only inside your head, because your auditory processing centers are processing it as if it were coming from OUTSIDE your head...For most of us, if we hear a voice or sound and know by observation of physical evidence that it's not possible for it to have happened from outside our head, we have a minor freak-out, probably identify the auditory event that some cross-firing in our brain has pushed "replay" on, and motor on with our lives.For people with some disassociative and personality disorders, that's not how their brains work. They instead take an alternative view that it's a real voice, coming from a source they can't see, and often ascribe supernatural origins to it, making the message it provides that much more compelling...There's lots of study in the area. See Cerebral activity associated with auditory verbal hallucinations: a functional magnetic resonance imaging case study and Tuning in to the Voices: A Multisite fMRI Study of Auditory Hallucinations and Neuroimaging of Auditory Hallucinations for some light reading on the subject.

How did gender dysphoria change from being a psychological disorder into a legally protected state of mind in the U.K.? Does this not stop people from getting the psychological help they need to return to a mentally healthier state of mind?

Mental illness is generally only diagnosed when it poses a risk of harm to yourself or others. For example, plenty people “hear” voices in their head - for some of these people, the voices are negative (they may degrade the person, or tell them to do things which could harm someone) but a lot of people have voices that might not do anything negative at all (some people don't even realise that they are hearing voices in their head and just happily chat away with them). While it may seem odd to neurotypicals, there's no ill health as a result of these voices - so why would we bother diagnosing and treating it?Gender dysphoria is no longer recognised as a mental illness because it simply isn't one. If you perform an MRI scan on a person who was born biologically male, but who identifies as female, their brain most closely resembles that of a biological female in how it behaves. Now you can argue that this person has a dysfunctional brain and we can spend millions of whatever currency you're using, and decades of research to study the brain and this proposed “dysfunction" and maybe at the end we'll be able to make a trans person's brain work in sync with their biological sex. But it's easier just to accept that some people are different, and treat them with respect and dignity. These people don't have time to wait decades to feel comfortable in their bodies - no amount of therapy or medication can make a born male identifying female person feel happy with their masculinity. It's far easier and safer for the individual to change their body through surgery and hormone therapy so that they're more comfortable in it than to attempt to manipulate their brain.These people are real. And they really don't need people who will never understand their situation telling them that they have a mental illness. The incidence of mental illness among trans people directly correlates with the extent to which they are supported and accepted - if we refuse to acknowledge their reality, we open the doors to malicious illness such as depression or anxiety.

Do you ever get tired of hearing people's problems as a psychologist?

If clients are the only people you talk to as a psychologist, you’re going to burn out quickly.You definitely hear difficult things on a regular basis when you do this work…and that’s why it’s so important to have a lot of counterbalances - hobbies, fun things you’re involved in, and happy & healthy relationships in your life.I think also, it’s about perspective as a practitioner.I don’t look at symptoms as “problems” - I see them more as a puzzle - something I need to figure out, and then help them overcome.When you first meet a client - in a few moments, you see usually see the misalignment, but you don’t know what all the answers are.I am relentless…I need to figure things out - and this is something I take as a personal challenge, in many ways. When clients came to me, I was internally incredibly motivated to figure their symptoms out, and really find the keys to whatever it was they were struggling with.You have to ask the right questions, know what to explore, examine, assess, and know what method to use to help them solve the issue(s) at hand.I want to solve the puzzle, and if they are truly committed to get to the other side of their struggles, I am in it to help them conquer it.

Is it true that tinnitus is similar to psychological disorder because people hear sounds in their head that don't exist?

No. In nearly all cases this not the issue, although I’m sure there are some cases of psychological tinnitus.Tinnitus is cased by a malfunction of the cells of the inner ear, and/or of the nerves leading to the brain. In most instances, tinnitus comes as a result of hearing loss - or other injury to the inner ear (such as exposure to loud noise).The inner ear has specialized Hair cells which, when vibrated, stimulate action potentials in the afferent nerves that lead to the audio centers of the brain. These cells and nerves have a Resting potential which, in normal function, is completely ignored by the brain. Literally filtered out.Because we have such precise hearing needs, these hair cells and nerves are very sensitive to changes - and when damaged, it can cause the hair cells or the nerves to respond differently to resting potential. For example in one theory of tinnitus, when a group of hair cells die the resting potential on the nerves drops to zero. The brain interprets this as a signal, and we “hear” that signal accordingly as tinnitus.As a weak analogy, tinnitus is more similar to having a speaker that is not properly grounded. In a speaker like this, there is a constant hum due to electrical feedback.Regardless of the potential causes of tinnitus, or bad analogies - the mechanisms that (for example) lead people with schizophrenia to hear music or voices that are not there are ENTIRELY different than the nerve conduction failures that lead to tinnitus.

How do we know that the human hearing limits are physical and not psychological?

Because we know pretty well how the inner ear is constructed and operates and we can see that it just doesn't respond to sounds with frequencies less than about 20 Hertz or greater than about 20,000 Hz. We know this from looking at the vibration patterns of the hearing organ itself (the organ of Corti and associated structures) and from observing the lack of stimulation of the auditory nerve which carries all acoustic information from the ear to the brain. It's not a psychological limit; our ear simply cannot process all possible sounds that exist.