What recovery looked like for Eleanor Longden
A psychologist who still hears voices describes how she went from wanting to drill them out of her head to living alongside them.
In the winter of 2000, Eleanor Longden lay curled up in a side room of an acute psychiatric ward. She heard voices that terrified her, and in the months that followed she planned to drill a hole in her head to get them out. Ten years after the voices first came, she graduated in psychology with the highest score her university had ever given, and went on to a doctorate. She still hears voices. When she wrote Learning from the Voices in My Head, published by TED Books in 2013, she had not taken medication for nine years.1
The book is short, part memoir and part argument. What makes it worth reading is the detail: it shows, step by step, what made things worse for her and what helped.
Two meanings of recovery
Researchers speak of recovery in two ways. Clinical recovery means fewer symptoms and a return to work, study and friendships. After a first episode of psychosis, about 58 in 100 people reach remission and 38 in 100 recover, over 5 to 7 years.2 With a stricter definition, covering both symptoms and social life, a median of about 14 in 100 people with schizophrenia recover.3
Personal recovery means building a meaningful life, with or without symptoms. A review of 97 studies summed up its ingredients in five words: connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment.4
Longden’s recovery is of the second kind. Her voices did not go away; her relationship with them changed.
What made things worse
Her first voice, at university, was calm. It described what she did, “She is leaving the building”, and seemed to put into words feelings she could not express. Things changed when she told a friend about it. The friend was horrified and insisted she see a doctor. The college doctor seemed bored while she talked about her anxiety, and became interested only when she mentioned the voice.1
What followed shows how a diagnosis can take over a person. She once had to leave an appointment early because she was reading the news at six on the student television station. On a later ward round, this was described as a delusion: “Eleanor has delusions of being a television news broadcaster.” In hospital, she was asked only once about the worst thing that had ever happened to her. A consultant told her and her mother that she would have been better off with cancer, “because cancer is easier to cure”. As her fear grew, so did the voices: more of them, and more hostile.1
What helped
The turn came with the psychiatrist Pat Bracken and his team, who treated recovery as something to expect. They asked where she wanted to be in ten years. She said she wanted to work in mental health and teach people about voices, and they helped her look up psychology courses. During a relapse, Bracken told her family: “Sometimes, you know, it snows as late as May, but summer always comes eventually.”1
The rest was practical, and slow. She made a safe space at home and a “comfort book” of photos and poems. She practised disobeying the voices, starting with small commands. With her mother, she listed the voices’ predictions and ticked off the ones that came true: no more than chance would. She gave the voices an appointment, at 8 p.m. for 20 to 30 minutes, on condition that they left her alone the rest of the day. Then she began to ask them questions, and found that each voice carried a feeling she had not been able to face: shame, anger, loss.1
A leaflet from the Hearing Voices Network helped her see the voices as messages about her life, not only as symptoms. The movement began in the Netherlands in the 1980s, with the psychiatrist Marius Romme, the researcher Sandra Escher and a voice hearer, Patsy Hage.1
Where the book argues
Longden writes as an activist as well as a survivor. Her central question for mental health care is not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What’s happened to you?” She rejects the diagnosis of schizophrenia, sees her voices as a response to trauma, and is sharply critical of biological psychiatry and of long-term medication.1
Research supports part of this: people with psychosis are almost three times as likely as other people to have faced adversity in childhood, such as neglect, bullying or the death of a parent.5 Other parts have aged. She wrote that the search for genes had come up empty; in 2022, a study of more than 76,000 people with schizophrenia found 287 regions of the genome linked to it.6
On medication, she warns that stopping suddenly carries serious risks, and that coming off psychiatric drugs needs to be safe, supported and gradual. She asks readers to take from her story what helps them and leave the rest.1
Near the end, she writes that “the essence of madness is isolation”, and that recovery is the opposite: reconnection.1 The words that stay are Bracken’s: “Don’t tell me what other people have told you about yourself … tell me about you.”1
