In the winter of 1984, a healthy woman living in Britain was reading at home when a voice spoke inside her head. Over the following months, the voices told her she had a brain tumor and sent her to the scanning department of a large London hospital. Her psychiatrist found no physical signs of a tumor. A scan found one anyway.
The case, published in the BMJ in December 1997 by consultant psychiatrist Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, has been retold again this summer and resurfaces online every few years. Its revival lands in the middle of a live practical question: when someone develops psychosis for the first time, should a brain scan be routine?
