Andrew’s story: Learning to live with voices and support others
Andrew’s journey through psychosis, voice hearing and peer support led him to a new understanding and to pursue a future in mental health nursing.
Andrew first connected with the Hearing Voices service in Kirkcaldy at the age of 22, after two acute hospital admissions. Referred by his mum, he was experiencing severe distress, suicidal thoughts and intense hallucinations. That came before a slow and honest journey towards ”the new normal”.
Andrew had been hospitalised multiple times in his early twenties, spending half of his first two years of being unwell in a psychiatric ward. His experience of psychosis was intense. “I tried to take my life. I had the whole shooting match. The voices, visuals, paranoia… and I’d see a clown at night for some time.”
At the time, schizophrenia had been suggested as one of the causes of what he was experiencing, but Andrew didn’t yet have a diagnosis or much understanding of what any of the labels could mean.
“I think I was young enough to be naive about what schizophrenia was. I’d seen it in films where people with it were shown as either dangerous or somehow brilliant, like ‘A Beautiful Mind’. So, I had no idea what it actually meant for me.”
Time spent in hospital for Andrew was overwhelming. “You don’t have any normality. It’s manic. On the wards, you don’t have personal space. You’re stuck in a room with 30 other folks. The wards, nurses and patients were great to me, but I didn’t find them conducive to getting well. For a while, it made me worse.”
Getting support and understanding schizophrenia
After one of his early hospitalisations, Andrew’s mum contacted the Hearing Voices service. “My mum was a librarian, so she had done research,” he says. “She was interested in the information booklets created by the service.” She was looking for voice hearing support that would help Andrew understand what he was going through and offer something more than medication alone.
Jean, a now retired Hearing Voices Outreach Worker in Fife, remembers: “Andrew was very anxious. His mum was on the phone asking what support we could provide.”
Andrew says he didn’t expect much. “I was signposted to a few services, but even before then, I was told the Hearing Voices service in Fife was really good, the best. I didn’t have any expectation or anything to lose.”
When they first met, Jean told Andrew, “It won’t always be like this. There is hope. You always need to hold on to hope.” Jean helped Andrew understand that there are many different causes of hearing voices. Not long after that first meeting, he was given an official diagnosis: schizophrenia.
Much of their early one-to-one work together was about grounding techniques and daily tools. “We did a lot of grounding and stuff like that, which helped me being out in public initially. I still use it here and there, 100%.”
Andrew remembers one moment that stuck with him: “We were walking on the street in Kirkcaldy and I told Jean that I think everyone was staring at me. And she said, ‘Do you think you’re that special? They’re just going about their day.’ And that makes sense.”
He was trying to fight what he was feeling. “I still had the ideology that I would be 100% fixed. If you break your leg, you get squared away and that’s it, done.” Jean reminded him that healing wouldn’t mean eliminating everything he was experiencing.
“It was accepting that this is your new normal.”
“It’s weird, but you have no choice. If you’re gonna hear voices and there’s nothing you can do to stop that, it’s hard. I wouldn’t sleep at night, worrying about voices, and I’d wake up seeing things and I’d get voices because of it.”
Support from his mum and close friends
Andrew talks with clarity about how much his mum did for him. “I probably wouldn’t be here without her, to be honest. Every day I was in the ward, every night she would come in with food. She would wash my clothes and bring things for me. Even when I got out.”
He added: “She’s a wee woman, but she showed up every day and booted me up the arse if I needed it. She harassed the life out of doctors to fight for me. She’s a manager: she likes answers and expects that.”
In the early days, things felt very different with his peers. “Mental health wasn’t a thing with my mates whatsoever then,” he said. “That bit probably depressed me the most: I couldn’t be with my mates.” He felt cut off from the people around him. “I did get isolated a bit from friends because I couldn’t go out. They didn’t get it at first, but they learned. They were stuck with me for 10 years, they had no choice,” he laughs. “They’re still here. One of my best friends, Fraser, is on the board of Change Mental Health. He really stepped up. All my friends were awesome. I was very lucky.”
Finding meaning and connection through the Hearing Voices group
After a year of one-to-one support, Andrew joined the Hearing Voices group. At first, he was nervous: “I was very anxious about coming into the group because of the paranoia. It was like a revelation that there are more people like you.”
The group gave him something to hold onto.
“It gave me purpose for a long time. You can learn a lot, bounce ideas off the people in the group. It made me feel like I’m not the only one in the world that’s there.”
He still has a version of the sensory box they developed together. “I’ve got felt, a wee aftershave and a Spotify playlist. Just things to bring me back to reality.”
Seeing Jean lead the group gave him another kind of hope. “She’s the inspiration for me. The fact that she experiences mental illness and she was there for me every day made me feel a bit like there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
The peer support Andrew received from the group continues to help him manage his voices. Not by removing or ignoring them, but by helping him live alongside them.
Studying nursing and thinking ahead
Andrew’s decision to become a mental health nurse didn’t come from his diagnosis alone. He always liked learning and had been thinking about studying before his mental health deteriorated. “I had mentioned this as an inpatient and it was quite quickly shrugged off, as apparently every person admitted to the wards wants to be a mental health nurse.”
A year after his last hospital stay, he took a chance. “I was just twiddling my thumbs. I could probably be doing something. So, I completed an access to nursing course and then I had my HNC. I didn’t expect I would actually pass any of this. I thought I’d go and get it, see what happens and I just kept passing.”
He graduated Mental Health Nursing degree in August 2025. “With my lived experience, it’s quite a unique thing to bring to the mental health ward.”
He’s open with colleagues about his experiences but keeps professional boundaries with patients. “If I’m in a corner talking to myself, they know that’s just me. But I don’t disclose to patients. It’s about being professional.”
Still, moments from his past sometimes resurface, like during a placement in the ward he stayed in years before.
“I was in the drugs queue dispensing and somebody shouted, ‘Andy, what the heck are you doing behind the counter?’ It was a boy I had been in with as a patient. He thought I’d broken in and was dispensing tablets.”
Living with voices
Andrew still hears voices and uses the tools he learned through peer support. “To be honest, I’m quite laid back. I’m now of the belief that whatever happens, happens. I’m aware that I don’t have a lot of control over my voices. When they come back, they’ll come back.”
His routine helps him manage. “As long as I take my tablets, eat semi-healthily and have something to wake up for, then I’m okay. But daily, I’m very lucky. After many trials, my medication works well. I just don’t worry as much anymore.”
He has adapted his life around the voices. “I always sleep with a film on my iPad every night. This was a great tactic to not hear all voices at night. If I’ve got something on in the background, you can concentrate on that. Some folk will listen to whale music, I watch Die Hard.”
Jean reflects on how far he’s come. “From my perspective, the loveliest thing is to see him believe in himself and his abilities. That is just his success story.”
contact
Our National Advice and Support Service can help you and people you care for with mental health concerns and money worries.
We can link and signpost you to relevant local and national support, including our own Change Mental Health services, as well supporting with debt, grants and benefits.
The service is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm (closed for lunch between 12.30pm to 1.30pm). Contact 0808 8010 515, email advice@changemh.org or fill in the form on the service webpage.
For full details about the service, visit the National Advice and Support Service webpage.
Other support
Some of the resources our team refers to provide support and information to voice hearers and those close to them and to other professionals.
