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I am an ardent mental health advocate, educator, researcher, and volunteer. I speak and write widely about my experiences, my understandings of the factors that led to my hearing voices, and the factors that contributed to my virtually full recovery.
My goal in doing this work is to help depathologize the voice-hearing experience and increase understanding that it is the social conditions of our lives that most profoundly affect people’s ability to live fully and with dignity in the world.
I haven’t always been so outspoken. That journey began in the fall of 2009, when I was sent by my employer to the organizational meetings of NAMI Elm City, the New Haven affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. At those meetings I met many amazing people in recovery, as well as family members, who were bravely and openly sharing their stories of anger, fear, confusion, doubt—and loss. Hearing their stories gave me the courage to begin telling my own.
Those who heard my story were initially surprised. Then they thanked me. Because I am high-functioning and had a modest professional career, seeing and hearing me gave them hope. It was then that I truly broke the silence.
Over the years I have spoken frequently, and learned much more, through my affiliations with the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) and the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS). I have learned that my experience is not unusual – there are literally millions of people throughout the world whose life experiences have been far more difficult, and whose trajectories of recovery are sometimes far more dramatic than mine.
I have learned that it is the social conditions of our lives that inform, that allow, that drive our ability to live fully in the world. And I have learned that many of the techniques I used to regain control over my mind and my life—argument, negotiation, acceptance when appropriate, and an unwavering determination to live as fully as I could in the real world—are tried and true methods—not only for living and being in the world, but also for managing our voices.
The determination to live in the world is itself an act of love—not only loving others, but also loving and forgiving oneself for the seeming indulgence of feeling pain, outrage, anger, and even grief. I believe my recovery—my freedom—has come through transmuting the bonds of love to the gifts of trust and mutual responsibility—trusting others enough to break the silence, allowing them to see, and perhaps to share and hold for a time, some part of my sorrow.
That determination has been strengthened by the education and advocacy work in which I have been engaged in the dozen years since I broke silence. My story of resilience and recovery, our stories of resilience and recovery, offer hope to others who do not yet know that in allowing ourselves to speak, to share our anger and our pain, we allow ourselves the opportunity to find acceptance, understanding, and belonging. In learning—or learning again—to love and trust, we can heal. And in so doing, we can become whole.
As I shared in a previous blog post, my depression started in my mid-teens; it stayed with me until I began actively hearing voices about 15 years later. During my senior year of college, I began struggling with insomnia and began to sense a dark, brooding presence within my mind. While it fed some of my writing and poetry, I don’t think it ever took the form of an external voice, although I did sometimes speak aloud to it.
By the time I graduated from college in 1972, I was profoundly depressed. That fall I moved to Boston and, to my parents’ horror, began therapy with a third-year psychiatric resident, whose warm and gentle guidance helped me begin to consider who I was and who I wished to be in the context of family, friends, and the world.
And what was that context? I was brought up in a largely loving, though imperfect refugee family that immigrated to the United States in 1955, when I was three and one-half years old. Upon our arrival in the United States, my middle sister, Daphne, and I were instructed to speak only English, even at home. While many first- and second-generation Asian children in the U.S. struggle to find a balance between Eastern and Western cultures, Daphne and I did not. We were given no Chinese literature to read, poetry to memorize and recite, or songs to sing. We had no copy books to practice Chinese calligraphy. Our carefully, parent-curated focus was entirely Western.
My parents thought that if we could assimilate as quickly and fully as possible, and if our English was very good, we would be better accepted. So I grew up reading European fairy tales and fables; Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology; and such American and European classic children’s books as Little Women, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Bambi, and Pinocchio.
I think my parents’ belief came from direct experience—originating with my grandfather, who was the first Chinese student to graduate from Brown University (class of 1912). Grandfather chose Brown largely because, at the time he applied, there were no Chinese students there. He reasoned, “I believed that if I could not have any Chinese to talk to, I would become more quickly acquainted with the English language. I knew that the more progress I made with English the better I would understand what I was studying” (Brown’s Versatile Chinese Quartette, 1911). Father also had direct experience learning to live as a Chinese person in America; he studied at Brown as well, earning a PhD in physical chemistry in 1932.
I am inordinately grateful for my very good English; it has been a factor in my resilience, and it was easier not to be forced to navigate the space between two very different cultures. While my almond-shaped eyes evoke a perception of perpetually “foreign,” my English challenges that initial assessment.
As my father, sisters, and I began adjusting to life in the United States, Mother grew depressed: she had lost not only her birth family and career, but also homeland and heritage. She dealt with those losses with a stoic silence, never speaking of the family she had left behind. My sisters did not seem to be impacted by Mother’s silence—perhaps because, being much older, they had more familial and cultural context. But her depression took its toll on me.
Over time I was able to make my peace with Mother, partly because I established the custom of seeking therapy whenever I was distressed. I firmly believe it was that learned discipline of exploring the stress, distress, and meaning in the interactions I had, plus a degree in counseling psychology, which guided and supported me when I began actively hearing voices. Just as I had learned to negotiate the terms of therapy, and through it consider the nature and sources of my distress, so too did I learn to counter the manipulations and demands of my voices. I learned to consider whether their presence and their desires were useful or helpful, and whether I should allow them to have a lasting impact on my life.
Since I first began hearing voices, was hospitalized, and diagnosed in 1983, I have had three extended periods of active voice hearing and continue to live with sometimes-distressing symptoms. I have worked mostly professionally, mostly continuously, and mostly full-time, even while experiencing symptoms. Medication helped occasionally (less than 2 years out of the past 38).
I believe my successful, mostly unmedicated recovery is the result of my having been carefully taught to be fair-minded and to trust myself: I knew my rights as an individual. Once I realized I was being bullied, I would not be bullied. So when the voices began making unreasonable demands, I was able to stand up to them, negotiating the terms of those relationships. But the true turning point was my decision to take responsibility for myself as well as for my young son.
I am inordinately grateful for the gift of motherhood and for my son’s presence in the world, which literally saved my life in 1990, preventing me from jumping from the 15th floor of a downtown office building when the torment of the voices seemed more than I could possibly bear. I could not allow him to grow up with the knowledge that his mother had died by suicide.
He also made my world friendlier. Because he is remarkable, I had higher status in each of the communities he also occupied: church, school, and the Neighborhood Music School. I found tremendous comfort in the fact that in each of those communities, I was, if nothing else, Paul’s mom. My role as a mother and responsibility to my son were my most important coping skills as I was emerging from the terror of the war with my demons.
Ultimately, it was love that saved me. I was lucky. I grew up in a largely-loving home, free of abuse. It was love, duty, and a sense of responsibility to my parents and family that held me to the world in my early twenties, when I was unutterably depressed. I could not dishonor the family by taking my own life. It was love for and responsibility to my son that held me, when I could see no possibility of escape from the voices and accompanying physical manifestations. And it is the requirement—the unwavering determination—to live as fully as I can, for my own sake as well as for the sake of all who love me, that continues to hold me.
And now I get to share my story to help others know there is hope–that recovery and resilience are possible. Before COVID, I participated in a training for Intentional Peer Support (IPS); IPS provides people who are struggling to live fully in the world with perspectives and skills needed to learn, grow, and nurture themselves and others.
The training was held at Advocacy Unlimited in Connecticut and was facilitated by IPS Founder Shery Mead and IPS Director Chris Hansen. Class members were asked to create a final project that would convey the IPS Three Principles: (1) From helping to learning together; (2) Individual to relationship; and (3) Fear to hope and possibility. In CLP, we articulate our core values – to ourselves, and with each other. So do we in IPS—through Connection, Mutuality, and Moving Towards. So, sharing some of my own core values, I will conclude with part of the poem I created for my final project (along with an invitation to reach out if you would like to connect):
…Without fear of censure and without false starts.
Without the nagging doubts that make us want to cry
Without the nagging doubts that make us want to lie
About who we are and what we really mean
Without that awful fear that we’re never really seen…
Reflection, intention, mutuality, respect
Understanding and belonging’s the main object
The thing that moves us from that place of fear
The thing that moves us to a world that we can bear
The thing that moves us to a place where we can hear
Each other with understanding and respect…
Portions adapted from “Citizenship and Psychosis: Crossing Boundaries of Mind and Heart,” American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation, Volume 22, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 2019, pp. 114-123, University of Nebraska Press [content declared free to read by the publisher during the COVID-19 pandemic]
Learn more about Claire via her memoir Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head and her work as research associate at the Yale University Program for Recovery & Community Health, president of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS)-US, and board member of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN)-USA
To reach Claire directly: clairebien1128@yahoo.com