The Octopus Man

"I wouldn’t say it’s fully exaggerated, but it’s not the case that everyone who hears voices is having experiences like Tom. However I do think something about the choice presented there is true to life: the aims of the medical team might be very different from the aims of the person having these hallucinatory experiences. They might have lived with these experiences for a long time and have come to their own meaning and understanding about them, and they might experience a range of emotions relating to them. Malamock, the octopus god, makes Tom feel like he has a mission. There’s something compelling about that and he can’t step away. And when faced with something that can remove part of your experience, part of your way of experiencing the world, that can be difficult for some people. I don’t think that’s always the case for people who have only just started having these experiences, and I’ve talked to a lot of people using psychosis services for the first time who just want things to stop, they just want things to make sense. But for other people, there’s a lot of deep meaning in their voice-hearing experiences. I would also say, however, that there are very few treatments that will completely get rid of these experiences. Often anti-psychotics won’t actually stop hallucinatory experiences, but they might make them less frequent. They might be a little less loud, or make them a bit more manageable. We’re talking about experiences that are so unusual and foreign to most people that having accounts of what it can be like to hear voices—that are sensitive to the nuances and don’t alarm or stereotype—is really important. It’s important that The Octopus Man is a funny book. The voice-hearer, Tom, is funny in his reaction to things. I’ve spoken to people before who say their voices can make them laugh, that there’s a spontaneity and playfulness about some of these experiences too. That’s not to say that it’s always like that. More that there’s a range of emotions associated with these internal worlds and these hallucinatory things going on. If fiction can help people understand that complexity and ambiguity, that’s one step towards people’s default reaction no longer being one of alarm. We’ve done research before about how even within close-knit families, the priorities of parents might be very different from the priorities of young people who are hearing voices. The parents might think we’ve got to find an answer, we’ve got to explain it, and the young people might think it’s about getting on with your life and learning to manage it."