From shouts to whispers hearing voices is not uncommon

FOR some, it happens once in a lifetime; for others it’s five times a day.

For some, it’s a whisper; for others, it’s a shout or the excited babble of a crowd of football fans. The number of children and young people who hear voices is higher than we might imagine.

Dr Ian Kelleher of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), who also works at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, led research on a 2012-published study, which found that more than one-fifth of 11- to 13-year-olds in Ireland had auditory hallucinations.