Voice hearing in refugees survivors of traumatic events

Abstract

Introduction: Voice hearing (VH) is commonly associated with psychosis but it has also been reported in PTSD. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to identify the prevalence of VH in a sample of 110 treatment-seeking trauma-affected refugees, and to examine the relative role of certain interpersonal traumatic events (i.e., torture, inprisonment, sexual assault, non-sexual assault), PTSD severity as well as a range of socio-demographic variables in the emergence of VH.Methods: VH was operationalised in accor-dance with item 27 of Dissociative Experi-ences Scale-II. PTSD symptoms were assessed using the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5). The relationship between potential pre-dictor variables and VH was analyzed using binary logistic regression.Results: The VH prevalence rate in our sample was 29.1%. Among traumatic events only torture significantly predicted the emer-gence of VH. Also PTSD severity and a higher degree of education were significantly associ-ated with VH.Discussion: Our study confirms that the ex-perience of VH is relatively frequent in refugee population surviving traumatic events. More-over, this study suggests the construct validity of severe PTSD with VH related to specific in-terpersonal traumatic events such as torture. These findings have important diagnostic and therapeutic implications, as increased aware-ness by clinicians that VH is not uncommon in trauma-affected refugees can potentially reduce misdiagnosis, e.g., by preventing cases of PTSD from being misidentified as psycho-sis. It is crucial to provide health care pro-fessionals with adequate knowledge on the diagnosis and treatment of these particularly complex patterns of post-traumatic disorders in refugees, as they are increasingly present in daily clinical practice in both developing and high-income countries.”

Keywords

• voice hearing
• hallucinations
• ptsd
• torture
• refugees