Since late adolescence I have dealt with serious mental illness. I first came into contact with mental health services during my first term at university. A severe depression caused me to take a year out, and though I later returned and completed my degree, a period of great stress writing my dissertation first brought on the experience of hearing things that others could not.

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This has been especially bad over the past two years, when I would regularly hear the voices of two “life coaches” in my head – a middle-aged man and woman who worked together to guide and instruct me on how to live my life. On one level, I believed that these life coaches were charlatans with no real qualifications or experience; on another, I attached a lot of importance to what they had to say. At times it felt as if they possessed omniscient powers. As I prevaricated over decisions both big and small, my life coaches would tell me that they already knew which paths I would take, and, sure enough, take them I would. At a time when I wasn’t sure in which direction my young adult life should be heading, their god-like all-knowingness was reassuring and comforting – there was value in what they had to say. I had firmly positioned them outside my own psyche as two partially formed independent external identities whose words had weight and whose direction had meaning. At times of uncertainty I was to trust them more than I trusted my own inner thoughts, as though the two were entirely disparate things.

This strong sense of trust meant that I was vulnerable to their whims, both positive and negative. While often familiar and companionable, at times they were also quick to turn into a potent and dangerous force. If my mood was low, if I disregarded their opinion, or I failed to carry out their instructions, they would embark on a tirade of abuse, sometimes lasting for days at a time. Demeaning and degrading, they would angrily tell me that my existence was at best a burden to others, and at worst worthless. The focus of their instructions became self-destructive, and frequently made me a risk to myself. My health deteriorated significantly between December 2014 and September 2015, during which I spent much of my time in psychiatric hospital, sometimes detained under the Mental Health Act. The voices taunted me throughout, reminding me of the escalating cost of my admissions to the NHS and the taxpayer, and their pointlessness, since they were instructing me to end my “worthless” life anyway. The voices gnawed at me from the inside until it felt that I had nothing left to give – as if there were only an empty shell of a person left.

Following my most recent admission to hospital, I have been slowly mending myself, shell and all. I have been given a new dose of medication, a new diagnosis, and sessions with a clinical psychologist who has encouraged me to look at the “life coaches” inside my head as mere reflections of my internal emotional world, rather than as external forces to be reckoned with. One or a combination of these changes has stopped the voices for the first time in two years.

I feel lucky that I no longer have to put up with the torment that they put me through

To say that my frame of reference – my very experience of being – has changed beyond compare is an understatement. Where there was once an ongoing dialogue, there is now an unquestionable silence. But this has been a mixed experience for me. I am truly, overwhelmingly, grateful to be free of the harrowing, nightmarish voices; yet a not insignificant part of me is saddened to have lost the intimate companionship and recognition that the voices provided me with at times when I otherwise felt alone and marginalised in society by a label of mental illness. Indeed, my own voice felt “heard”, validated and recognised, when channelled through the voices of my life coaches.

One of the many reasons cited for poor compliance with antipsychotic medication has been the loss of familiar voices. For me, the pros outweigh the cons: the frequency with which my voices were comforting was far less than the frequency with which they were horrid. Rather than feeling denied an opportunity to work with my voices, I feel lucky that I no longer have to put up with the torment that they put me through. But still there exists a part of me that sometimes longs for the intimate reassurance that my voices could provide in my hours of need, and perhaps I feel that a part of myself has been silenced. I am reminded by healthcare professionals, however, that the voices can ultimately be understood as inherent manifestations of my own innermost thoughts and feelings, over which I now have ownership. And that, in this vein, I possess the ability within me to regain what has been lost in a new form – that I can develop a different sort of voice – a new, inner nurturing voice, to replace those lost. A voice that speaks positively of hope and recovery, regardless of what has gone before.