alt Hacker News> To this point, some cultures see schizophrenia as friendly, not scary.
That should not be your conclusion from the article.
"the voices" are hardly the only symptom that people with schizophrenia suffer from. A lot of those affected don't have auditory hallucinations at all and are still suffering from one of the (if not the) most debilitating mental disorders out there.
Calling it "friendly" risks trivialising of the very real symptoms.
> The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and evidence of a sick condition.
> In Accra, Ghana, where the culture accepts that disembodied spirits can talk, few subjects described voices in brain disease terms. When people talked about their voices, 10 of them called the experience predominantly positive; 16 of them reported hearing God audibly. “‘Mostly, the voices are good,’” one participant remarked.
This seems clinically useful. The existence of other symptoms doesn't really change that fact.