What Eleanor Longden's TED Talk Reveals About Living With Voices

In 2013, a young woman named Eleanor Longden stood on the TED stage and told a room full of strangers about the years she spent hearing voices no one else could hear. She had once been an ordinary college student. Then the voices arrived, grew hostile, and eventually led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, hospitalization, and years of treatment that tried, again and again, to silence them. What finally helped wasn't silencing the voices at all. It was learning to listen.

Eleanor Longden's Story

Longden's talk, "The Voices in My Head," (TED, 2013) describes a mental health system that treated her voices as nothing more than symptoms to be eliminated -- meaningless static generated by a broken brain. For years, that approach left her worse off, not better. It was only when she started working with clinicians who took a different stance -- curious rather than alarmed, willing to ask what the voices meant instead of simply how to stop them -- that her recovery truly began.

What she discovered, piece by piece, was that her voices carried real information. They had emerged, she came to understand, out of real pain and real experience, expressing things she hadn't had the words or safety to say out loud. Once she approached them as messengers instead of enemies, their content and their power over her began to change.

Watch the full TED talk here: Eleanor Longden: The Voices in My Head

From Fighting the Voices to Listening to Them

This shift -- from adversarial to curious, from suppression to relationship -- is the heart of what makes Longden's story so powerful, and so instructive far beyond her own diagnosis. Most of us have some version of an internal voice we've been taught to fight: a harsh inner critic, an anxious refrain, a memory that won't stay quiet. The instinct is almost always to push it away, argue with it, or drown it out. Longden's experience suggests a different path: that even the most frightening internal experiences often soften not when we defeat them, but when we finally turn toward them with curiosity.

What This Has to Do With ACT

This is also, at its core, the stance at the center of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT doesn't ask you to believe every thought or voice is literally true, and it doesn't require you to like what you're experiencing. Instead, it teaches psychological flexibility: the capacity to make room for difficult internal experiences, including distressing thoughts, sensations, or voices, without needing to win a war against them first. The goal isn't necessarily eliminating symptoms. It's changing your relationship to them enough that they no longer dictate the whole of your life.

Longden wasn't in ACT specifically, but her recovery illustrates exactly what ACT aims to help people do: build a life oriented around meaning and values, even while living alongside experiences that never fully disappear. For someone navigating psychosis, this can be the difference between a life organized entirely around symptom suppression and a life that has room for connection, purpose, and identity again.

Why This Matters in Treatment for Psychosis

I think about Longden's talk often in my work with clients navigating psychosis or a schizophrenia diagnosis. Her story is a powerful reminder that healing rarely comes from treating every difficult internal experience as an enemy to defeat. Sometimes it comes from finally being curious enough to ask what it's protecting you from, or trying to tell you.

If this resonates with your own experience, or a loved one's, trauma-informed, ACT-based treatment for psychosis and schizophrenia can offer a different way forward. Contact me if you'd like to talk about what that could look like for you.