The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  He was born in Dundee, in 1958, and raised by good Catholic parents on a bad estate called Kirkton. He loved church and he loved rugby and it was after a match, drinking with his teammates in a notorious pub called the Clep, that he saw her. ‘It was one of those love-at-first-sight things. She was stunning,’ he says, still visibly flushed all these years later. Even in that part of Dundee, the Clep was known as a hard place. Nothing was allowed to distract from the alcohol: not a TV nor a telephone nor even a jukebox. All you got at the Clep were seats, beer and a place to piss. Women never drank there. And yet, there she was, up at the bar – a posh-talking girl with a black fringe and hippy bangles and bracelets, ‘and jeans – very tight jeans. And she had these amazing, penetrating blue eyes. That’s what really got me: those eyes.’

  Ron was not quite sixteen. Annabel was twenty-five. He asked her if she wanted to go to the Hong Kong, a late-night Chinese restaurant that had a bar and a dancefloor. ‘It’s not that I was particularly confident,’ he explains, ‘it’s just that it was her.’ When she said yes, he was amazed. ‘I had to ask the captain of my rugby team to have a whip-round because I didn’t have any money.’

  Ron and Annabel became lovers. ‘We had a great time together. She showed me a new world. Classical music, rock music, art. She taught me what love was.’ Two years into their relationship, they decided to marry. Then, one day, for reasons he declines to share, Annabel died. ‘And my life became a total misery.’

  Still, he had his rugby. He needed his rugby. He needed it because it was the only way he knew how to deal with his life’s other abnormal experience.

  As a boy, Ron had dreamt of becoming a priest. When he was ten, a man called Father Adrian joined his local church and quickly became a popular and respected member of the community. The man and the boy grew close. One morning, following mass, Father Adrian told him that they needed to pray. They knelt slowly in front of one another. ‘You are a sinner,’ said the priest, softly. ‘You have led me into sin. What’s going to happen now – it’s because you’ve been tempting me. It’s your fault. And, for doing this to someone like me, you deserve to burn in hell.’

  When it happened, Ron felt as if he was looking down on himself. He remembers the smell of incense and Father Adrian’s purple robe. He remembers thinking, ‘Why does God hate me so much?’

  The abuse went on for nearly a year, until Ron stopped attending mass. Instead, he would sit on Law Hill, staring down at the church and eating ‘mushie’ – the honeycomb sweets he would buy with the money that was supposed to go into the collection. He would expel his feelings of guilt and shame and rage by imagining his opponent in a rugby scrum was Father Adrian. ‘Rugby wasn’t a sport for me. It was a coping strategy,’ he says. ‘I’d picture his face and try to kill him.’

  When he was twenty-one, Ron broke his hip. His doctor told him he would never play again. His coping strategy gone, he was in despair. Shortly afterwards, he was working on some analysis at work, waiting for the computer to finish its calculations. He was sitting there, bored, idling and doleful. And then Annabel said to him, ‘You’ve done that wrong.’ He froze. What the …? He looked around. There was no one there. ‘So, being a good Scot,’ he recalls, ‘I went to the pub and got absolutely rat-arsed.’

  He carried on drinking, day after day, more and more and more. In the chaos of his increasing dereliction, he stopped making money for the firm. After eight weeks, he was dismissed with a payout of thousands. He spent the money on alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines and purple hearts to help him come down. The voices worsened. Annabel would beg him, ‘Come and join me, so that we can be a family again.’ Father Adrian would barrack him, ‘You’re a bastard, aren’t you? It’s your fault. I told you: you deserve to burn in hell. You led me into sin and you fucking loved it.’

  At first, Ron assumed that he was ill. But soon, he became less sure. When someone suffering auditory hallucinations hears voices, they really do hear them. They sound no different to a true voice. Sometimes they come from ‘inside’ your head, often they come from outside – exactly as if you were sharing a room with someone invisible. Sometimes they talk to you (‘You’re a cunt’), sometimes they’ll narrate your every action (‘Now the cunt is making tea’), sometimes different voices will discuss you (‘Look at that cunt, he’s got nothing left to live for,’ ‘I know, look at him! No one loves him, he might as well just kill himself’).

  ‘It was just constant, constant, constant,’ says Ron. ‘You’d just want to get away from them. And the problem is, you start to think they’re real. Because you can hear them. You wonder – why can other people not hear them?’

  The doctors in the Royal Free Hospital told Ron that he should ignore the voices. ‘You’d say to the nurse, “My voices are really bad, can I talk to you about them?” and she’d say, “Let’s play Scrabble!”’ He noticed that being labelled a ‘schizophrenic’ led to people patronising him. Like the time he was forced to attend a lasagne-making class. ‘I said, “Look love, I might be mad, but I’m not fucking stupid.”’ A nurse followed him everywhere. ‘Bathroom, toilet, the works,’ he says. ‘It’s dehumanising. It starts the institutionalisation. You start to think, If that’s what they expect, that’s what I’m going to give them.’

  ‘Give them what?’ I ask.

  ‘Grief,’ he says, smiling. ‘I started telling them to fuck off all the time.’

  Ron was forced to take medication that threatened terrible side-effects: tremors, weight gain, sexual dysfunction and the increased risk of diabetes and cardiac arrest. ‘The meds made me drool, slime coming out of my mouth, I’d be stiff. I’d say to the doctors: “You’re just a fucking Nazi; just a pill merchant.” But then one of the older hands had a word with me in the smoke room. He said, “You want to get out of here, yeah? You have to keep your head down. Just tell them you’re feeling better.” That’s how I learned to lie.’

  Eighteen months after his sectioning, Ron lied his way to release. He took the first coach out of Victoria coach station and ended up in Manchester. To avoid going back into the psychiatric system, he lived on the streets. When the voices worsened, a doctor gave him a three-month supply of medication. He used them to try to kill himself. He woke up four days later, sectioned once more, in a Manchester hospital. And that is where everything was to change.

  A support worker told Ron about a radical-sounding group that was forming nearby. It was inspired by the work of controversial Dutch psychiatrist Professor Marius Romme, who encouraged members not to ignore their voices, but to accept their reality and actively listen to them. ‘By now I’d learned not to rock the boat,’ he says. ‘So I told her it was the craziest idea I’d ever heard. She said that if I agreed to go, we could stop for a beer on the way back. And I said, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened in psychiatry. Let’s go.”’

  When Ron arrived at the fledgling Hearing Voices Network meeting, he was told something that ran counter to all the psychiatric lore he had ever heard. His voices were not a disease. They were real. They had meaning. They were a part of him and he needed to listen to them. To Ron this made sense: his principal voices were Father Adrian and Annabel. It was as if the two most terrible events in his life had taken living form; as if he was being haunted, daily, by the saddest things that had ever happened to him. How could they be dismissed as ‘irrelevant’, just a symptom of schizophrenia, as a cough is to a cold? Father Adrian and Annabel were part of him. Of course they were. ‘I felt total astonishment,’ he says. ‘My support worker and I sat in the car outside for hours just talking about that idea. We never made it to the pub.’

  It was the beginning of a journey that led to Ron being drug-free and happy. By listening to his voices, negotiating with them and taking a firm parental line against them, he retook control of his mind. Within a year of that first meeting, he was made British national coordinator of HVN. He became known for his ‘Mad Pride’ stance and his ‘Psychotic and Proud’ shoulder tattoo. Today he says, ‘V
oice-hearers are not sick. We’re just a variant, a variation, like people who are left-handed.’ He also dismisses the idea that auditory hallucinations are a principal symptom of schizophrenia. ‘There’s no evidence that schizophrenia even exists,’ he says. ‘The diagnostics for any major mental illness are, in my opinion, completely subjective. You can see three different psychiatrists on the same day and get three different diagnoses. If you’re hearing voices and you’ve got a straight face they’ll call you schizophrenic. If you’re laughing they’ll call you manic depressive. If they don’t like you, they’ll call it a personality disorder. These are just catchall terms that psychiatrists use when they’re baffled.’

  The story of Ron Coleman is both gripping and exceptional. On his telling, it appears to be a case in which the consensus view of the scientific establishment has been proved wrong – by a movement whose spokesman is categorically, unashamedly and literally mad. As Ron tells his story, I find myself rooting for him. It is as if the biases of my brain are reaching out towards him, a thousand arms, encouraging, cajoling, applauding. All of them are silently lobbying my unconscious to believe the right thing.

  Just as Ron’s mind contains ciphers of Annabel and Father Adrian, mine surely echoes with the felt emotions of Gemma Hoefkens and John Mack and my father and a hundred others. Do I want Ron to be proved right because I identify with the irrational ones? Is it because, as I have grown older, I have found an urge to defend my father, to excuse his religious beliefs rather than to scorn them? I ask the questions because I really don’t know the answers. How could I? My biases are invisible to me – I feel them only as a wordless urge, an emotion, something inside me that fountains upwards when I listen to Ron speaking. I can’t see these sensations or analyse them forensically. I can’t locate their source. I can’t alter them.

  I wonder, too, if there might be a simpler reason for my unprofessional wish for Ron to be right. His is the perfect story: the kind, poor boy – a churchgoer! – who falls victim to tragedy and a powerful elite. He is locked up against his will. He fights back. At first, he fails. He nearly dies. And then he rises, resplendent, to take on the heartless operatives of psychiatry on behalf of an army of his fellow-repressed around the globe.

  Stories are so central to our understanding of the world that their importance can be easy to miss. Like the cats raised in cages without horizontal lines, we are at risk of bumping into the fact that our own stories can lie to us if we are never given reason to consider it. I wonder how often we are seduced by attractive plots that we have happened across in life: tricked into faulty beliefs by our hatred of Goliath.

  Gemma’s story also told of a death’s-door underdog, flirting with disaster at the hands of an unfeeling medical profession, only to fight back, then saving herself and, ultimately, others. The Skeptics pitch their battle as a crusade against evil stage psychics who exploit the bereaved and amoral chemists who knowingly hawk ‘sham medication’ as poor, sick children wilt in their beds.

  Who are the heroes? Who are the villains? Jesus or Dawkins? Gemma or Randi? Are they of your tribe? Or are they of the repulsed and repulsive other? The explorers of neuroscience and experimental psychology tell us that we make these decisions instantly, underneath the surface of our awareness. Something happens, down there in the unconscious. Some mechanism, some switch, some electrical storm of cognition ranges across the strange territories where we keep our models of the world and where the restless, barracking ghosts of everyone we have met who has affected us still roam: mothers, fathers, lovers, dead wives, abusive priests. This is the place where beliefs are made and where madness gathers. It is the realm of the invisible forces that I have been hunting.

  *

  Professor Marius Romme settles slowly into his armchair on a late afternoon in winter. The room he has taken, during a teaching visit at the University of Durham’s Institute of Advanced Studies, is darkening quickly as the ancient green and the chapel outside the window fade into the dusk. Even at seventy-seven, Romme is attractive: tanned, tall and fit, his grey hair waxed back in a charismatic sweep. Beside him, his longtime research partner Dr Sandra Escher sits forward, more anxious, alert and eager to please. Romme is the man that started it all, when he met a woman in Maastricht whose life was commanded by gods.

  Back in the mid-1980s, Romme was a professor at the University of Maastricht who practised as a psychiatrist in the local Community Mental Health Centre. Then, as now, psychiatrists used one of two ‘bibles’ to diagnose their patients, the most famous of which is known as the DSM. It is like a catalogue of madness, and lists thousands of psychiatric diagnoses along with their accompanying symptoms.

  Because of the gods, and all the things they forbade her, this patient had lost friends and the will to do very much at all. According to the DSM, if you are hearing voices and you are isolated and you lack initiative, that is three of the symptoms of schizophrenia – and three ticks means you have it. So that is what Romme told her: ‘You’ve got schizophrenia.’

  The patient was not impressed.

  ‘Well, that’s all very nice,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t help me. You’ve just given it a name. How can I learn to live with these voices?’

  ‘I just didn’t know,’ Romme tells me. He arranged for her to meet with another voice-hearer, thinking it might, at least, help with her isolation. He was amazed when they understood each other’s experiences so completely. ‘It was clear that they really did hear voices,’ he says. ‘They didn’t fantasise it.’ He recruited more voice-hearers but, while they enjoyed meeting one another, they couldn’t work out any real strategies for coping with their constant malady. Then Romme had an idea. His work with unusual humans had impressed upon him the almost infinite variety of experience there is out there. What if they made an appeal on television? It was a long shot, but perhaps they would find one person who heard voices and had somehow found a way to manage them.

  When they went on a chat show, in 1987, they found not one person who was happy hearing voices – they found more than two hundred. ‘That was really shocking,’ says Romme. ‘My training told me that all auditory hallucinations are signs of pathology. But these people were perfectly happy.’

  While interviewing these happy voice-hearers, Romme secretly tried to diagnose them by finding three DSM-listed symptoms to tick. ‘And I couldn’t,’ he says. ‘I was astonished. It was a totally new experience. These people were in no need of help.’

  ‘What was the difference between the happy voice-hearers and the unhappy ones?’ I ask.

  ‘We found that non-patients are not afraid of their voices,’ he says. ‘Patients are, and they had more intense and frequent traumatic experience in their young lives. Eighty per cent of patients had experienced traumatic, overpowering situations. For the non-patients, it was about forty or fifty per cent.’

  These hugely significant numbers led Romme to his heretical hypothesis: what if hearing voices is nothing to do with a physical disease of the brain? What if it is a natural response, triggered by trauma? And it has a positive purpose, to be like an adviser? An encouraging presence, willing someone to look differently and more creatively at their problem? What if it is actually a good thing?

  The objections to this are obvious. What about when they call you a worthless cunt? That doesn’t seem very helpful. ‘The voices reflect the way the person looks at their problem,’ he says. ‘If the person looks negatively at it, their voices join the negative side.’ What about the voices that preach suicide? ‘These voices are saying, “Do something to change your life, otherwise you’ll be dead,”’ he says. ‘It’s a metaphoric message.’

  Romme soon came to doubt the rationale of medicating voice-hearers. ‘If you’ve been sexually abused, that’s the problem, not how you react,’ he says. Although he concedes that anti-psychotics ‘help a little bit’ and that ‘a small number’ of patients stop hallucinating, he adds that they work by reducing emotion, which you need in order to learn how to live with
your voices. They also kill one in a hundred. ‘Is it worth it?’

  Romme’s superiors at the University of Maastricht were not impressed by all this wild heresy. In fact, they reacted in a way that is remarkably similar to that of the Harvard dean who led the attempts at silencing John Mack.

  ‘They said I was going crazy,’ says Romme. ‘They accused me of hearing voices myself. It soon became clear that they were trying to get me out. I had challenged the medical model and it was not appreciated.’

  It took a while, but Professor Romme eventually convinced some of his discipline’s leading thinkers that he wasn’t insane. One of these academics is the University of Manchester’s Professor Richard Bentall, who has been studying auditory hallucinations since 1985.

  ‘I am a reluctant convert to what I am about to tell you,’ he says. ‘There is incontestable evidence that there’s a wide range of bad things that can happen to kids, including sexual abuse, which increase the risk of psychosis dramatically. Contrary to what you’ll find in virtually every psychiatric textbook and regular papers published in respected journals, the evidence for a genetic determination of these disorders to specific genes is wafer-thin. If there was a gene for schizophrenia they would have found it by now. What it looks like is that there are probably a thousand genes which each produce a small increase of risk. However – and this is also contrary to what you’ll find in psychiatric textbooks – there is a massive amount of evidence of environmental factors playing a role.’

  In his book Doctoring the Mind, Bentall quotes multiple surveys of psychotic patients who have experienced ‘very high levels of sudden trauma, including violent incidents and sexual assaults, compared to the experiences of ordinary people.’ A typical example is a 2004 paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry that found the rate of childhood abuse in adults suffering psychosis to be fifteen times greater than expected. He is currently preparing to submit a meta-analysis to ‘one of the world’s top medical journals’ which will compile ten years of large-scale studies into the environmental causes of psychosis. ‘Just to tell you what the meta-analysis will say – the odds ratio is three. That means that somebody who has been sexually abused has a three times greater chance of becoming psychotic than somebody who has had a healthy childhood.’