Romme & Escher Research

The central insights of the research by Romme & Escher were as follows:

1. voice hearing in itself is not pathological

2. voice hearing is also not diagnosis-specific

3. In about 70% of researched voice hearers, voice hearing was clearly correlated with difficult events in the life of the voice hearer

4. It is the relationship with the voices, which decides whether one becomes a patient in psychiatric services or not. 

5. It is possible to learn how to have a constructive relationship with the voices

6. It is possible to systematically work out the context between the life of the person and the voices. 

Dr Escher also conducted further research with 80 children between 2002 and 2005 in relation to the natural course of their voice hearing experiences. In contrast to the conclusions of many other studies, Dr Escher found that voice hearing in childhood does not automatically represent a pre-messenger of later pathology. Whether pathology would indeed develop later on in life was in fact closely connected to how the voice hearer and their surroundings were dealing with the experience. A constructive way of dealing with the voices understood them to be part of a natural development of the child. 

Articles by Romme and Escher

In the following you can find a list of publically available articles by Prof. Dr. Marius Romme and Dr. Escher. 

1. Romme, M. und Escher, S. (1989) Hearing voices. <LINK schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/2/209.full.pdf+html _blank - "Hearing voices (Romme und Escher, 1989)">Schizophrenia Bulletin</link>. Vol. 15(2), Seiten 209 - 216. 

2. Escher, S., Romme, M., Buiks, A., Delespaul, P. and van Os, J. (2002) Independent course of childhood auditory hallucinations: a sequential 3-year follow-up study. <LINK bjp.rcpsych.org/content/181/43/s10.full.pdf+html _blank>British Journal of Psychiatry</link>. Vol. 181(Suppl. 43), s10 - s18.