Ted Talk #1
14 September 2015
The voices in my head
Eleanor Longden is the speaker of this Ted Talk, and is a research psychologist. Longden was diagnosed with schizophrenia in college. Schizophrenia is a mental illness where people hear voices and the voices tell them what to do. After being diagnosed, Longden struggled with coping her illness and was hospitalized multiple times.
At 27 seconds Longden describes how she felt leaving about leaving home to attend college. She describes being frightened, insecure, and empty on the inside, but on the outside she hid it well from everyone around her. That she was very good at hiding her true feeling from everyone around her, but there was no way of predicting what would happen to her next.
After Longden began hearing voices she confessed to a friend about it. Her friend then told her she should seek professional help as soon as possible because that is not normal. The school psychiatrist then referred her to a psychologist to get on medication. Years of medication and hospitalization had Longden confused and unstable with her illness. She would self-harm and become erratic. Longden learned to live with her voices. The voices are apart of what’s inside her trying to express itself. When the voices tell her “not to leave the house” she thinks about why she feels unsafe at that particular moment and deals with it accordingly to make herself feel safe again.
Schizophrenia runs in my distant family and I watched this Ted Talk to get a better understanding of this disease. Seeing from the outside how hard it is for the immediate family to deal with this along with the person that has this mental illness I was hoping to get some more insight on what a schizophrenic person goes through on a day to day basis. I have taken classes and learned signs and symptoms of schizophrenia along with other mental illnesses but never knew exactly what the person felt.