The voices in my head, by Eleanor Longden (Silvia Pers Pérez)

Eleanor was a girl who, after having ended her high school studies, started university. People had high expectations on her, and her first semester was pretty alright. But in the second, while she was leaving a room, she heard a voice saying "She is leaving the room", and nobody around seemed to have said anything, but the voice was a real thing.

Soon, this voice started to tell all she did in third person, and she made what she calls "my first mistake" (because the voice didn't seem to be innocuous anymore): telling a friend of hers she heard a voice. Far from seeming accepting, said friend was quite horrified and she advised Eleanor to seek medical help, which is, according to her, "my second mistake", because the voice started being harmful to her and to others. The college GP, from whom she sought advice, was told about the low self-esteem, angst and fears about the future that surrounded her life. But the he seemed to be shocked when Eleanor talked about the voice. So shocked he even dropped his pen, swung around and referred her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with schizophrenia: a diagnosis caused by, among other reasons, sexual abuse suffered as a child.

After uncountable psychiatric hospital admissions and so many drugs taken, Eleanor's learned to live with the voices. Now she doesn't spend nights protecting her parents from an apparent danger with a plastic fork anymore, and instead of it she's learned to understand what the voices mean. For example, if the voice tells her that something bad is happening outside, she doesn't take the literal meaning but she understands it as the voice's telling her that she is insecure. That way she can do something positive about it.

So positive she got her psychology graduate ten years later with the highest grade her university had ever given, and a master a year after with the same merits. She's worked in mental health services (where she learned to ask "What's happened to you?" instead of "What's wrong with you?" and had the opportunity to help people who had the same problem as her), and she's also a member of the Hearing Voices Movement, an association that doesn't see voices as bad things but as a sane way our brain has to tell us that something's wrong. 

Silvia Pers Pérez