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'Having an imaginary friend and hearing voices is good for children';
Sunday Herald, The, Sep 5, 2004 by Stephen Naysmith
CHILDREN who hear voices or chat to an imaginary friend are not a cause for concern. They could be more imaginative, creative and socially able than those who don't.
Because "hearing voices" is an indicator of serious mental illnesses in adults, parents are often alarmed if their children show signs of hearing things or people who aren't there.
Some psychiatrists have reinforced this idea, arguing that hallucinations in childhood could be a warning sign of future mental health problems.
Now research by psychologists is suggesting that susceptibility to such hallucinatory experiences may be a normal feature of the mental world of many young children.
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Experiments carried out in Australia and Britain have shown that one child in three can hear "words" when played a soundtrack of speech so distorted that it cannot possibly be understood normally.
When they and their parents were questioned about their home life, 90% of the same children were also found to have created an imaginary companion for themselves.
In the Australian research a CD was played to 30 children aged between three and five, of a 10-year old girl reading a prose passage. The recording had been chopped up, played backwards, slowed and speeded up to render its content jumbled and linguistically meaningless.
Nevertheless, 10 children reported hearing a voice saying words they recognised. Nine of these children also had imaginary friends, compared with just one in four of the children who hadn't heard recognisable words on the tape.
At a conference of the British Psychological Society in Leeds yesterday, Dr Charles Fernyhaugh, of the University of Durham, said a subsequent study of British children covering a wider age range had shown the same pattern, leading to the conclusion that, far from being an indication of future mental ill-health, hallucination-like experiences in pre-school children are a normal part of their psychological development.
"For a long time an imaginary friend was seen as something strange, something to be worried about, and children who had them were seen as being shy, withdrawn or different," Fernyhaugh said. "Psychiatrists for years have been trying to argue that having hallucinations in childhood is a sign of future mental disorder.
"We have found quite the opposite. There is a lot of research now to suggest that children with imaginary friends may be better socially adapted. They are less shy than other children, have great imaginative and creative powers and could be better at understanding the minds of others."
While hearing voices is an alarm signal in adults, and can be a problem for children if combined with strange behaviour or other symptoms, in many cases it seems to be normal, he added.
"Just because hallucinations in adulthood can be a sign of mental disorder and are distressing to people, we shouldn't assume that it is the same for childhood. It might actually be a good thing.
"But that doesn't mean that a child who doesn't have an imaginary friend is a cause for worry."
The research raises the question of at what stage parents should be concerned about a child who hears voices. Fernyhaugh said research varied, but suggested anywhere between 30% and 65% of children had an imaginary friend at some stage. "They usually disappear by the age of seven or eight, but we don't know why that is," he said. "But parents should be reassured that all the evidence suggests imaginary friends in childhood are normal."
In fact, some adults who hear voices are now beginning to reject the stigma that comes with their symptoms, he said. "There is a movement against the idea that just because you hear voices you are mentally ill. For the last decade there have been lots of people who hear voices and resist the idea that there is anything wrong with them. They are 'happy with their voices'.
"But auditory hallucinations can be very distressing and frightening for those who suffer from them, and it remains the case that it is something psychiatrists take seriously."
Fernyhaugh and his team now plan further research to assess how imaginary friends develop and why they usually disappear before a child reaches the age of 10.
While they hope parents will be reassured by the findings announced yesterday, Fernyhaugh admits many are frustrated at some level by their child's insistence on an imaginary companion.
"Parents can get pretty fed up, because a child will insist on laying a place for the imaginary friend, and everything the parents do for the child they have to do for the imaginary friend as well."
Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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