Brain Networks in Psychosis

Abstract

Virginia Woolf wrote in her suicide note that: ‘I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do’ (Virginia Woolf to Leonard Woolf, 18 March 1941, quoted in Bell 1972). Her depression was accompanied by such psychotic features as auditory hallucinations at many different periods of her life. As far back as 1921 she was writing in her memoir ‘Old Bloomsbury’ that: ‘I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among the Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas’ (Woolf 1921). Her husband Leonard Woolf writes that: ‘She spoke somewhere about ‘the voices that fly ahead’, and she followed them … when she was at her worst and her mind was completely breaking down again the voices flew ahead of her thoughts: and she actually heard voices which were not her voice; for instance, she thought she heard the sparrows outside the window talking in Greek. When that happened to her, in one of her attacks, she became incoherent because what she was hearing and the thoughts flying ahead of her became completely disconnected’ (Woolf 1995; Bell 1972). There is also evidence that on rare occasions she suffered from visual hallucinations. For instance, she says on becoming less obsessed with her deceased mother, that ‘I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her’ (Woolf 1939). This chapter presents what we now know of the failure of brain function leading to the distortions of consciousness as occurs in auditory and visual hallucinations.