You may find this video interesting in light of students experiencing voices. It is a TED talk from Elenaor Longden. She shares fascinating anecdotes around what assisted her in her recovery both in terms of support and internal grappling with her inner voices.
A fine example of resilience.
To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student, heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking. Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn't know how to help her. Longden tells the moving tale of her years-long journey back to mental health, and makes the case that it was through learning to listen to her voices that she was able to survive.
Eleanor Longden overcame her diagnosis of schizophrenia to earn a master’s in psychology and demonstrate that the voices in her head were “a sane reaction to insane circumstances”.
What I found particularly interesting in her story was how she found the insight to work through her inner torment and fragmentation. So often in the mental health field, clients are referred to as "lacking insight". Yet, they certainly have insight into their own experience! They are often counselled to see and understand their voices as symptoms of a mental illness as opposed to an experience. Eleanor explains how, in her case, this was very detrimental.
But having been encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom, my fear and resistance towards it intensified. Now essentially, this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind, a kind of psychic civil war, and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing. Helplessly and hopelessly, I began to retreat into this nightmarish inner world in which the voices were destined to become both my persecutors and my only perceived companions.
In an amazing form of cognitive reframing, she began to interpret her voices as metaphors.She writes that she learned that her:
voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems.