Some people don't want to know that they have a mental health issue and they'll do anything to deny they have one - even to the stage where they would rather believe the voices they hear are demons - rather than seek professional help. Perhaps it's better to create a monster and have to live with that rather than admit there's something wrong and have it dealt with.

Here's what nobody will tell you, and I'm saying this from the perspective of a Spiritual person who is a medium and has worked in mental health. Hearing voices is more common than people would admit to and it's not a mental health issue. The 'real' mental health issues stem from the voices being the manifestation of a deeper mental health issue if there is one, and how people 'respond' to the voices. Hearing a voice in the back of your head is regarded as more of an idiosyncrasy than a mental health issue. People hearing a voice they believe is God and they jump off a bridge because of it is considered to be a mental health issue that cause danger to the person hearing the voices or others. It's one of the reasons people get guns and lay siege to schools.

Schizophrenia is not a disease. What can happen - it happened to me and a few others I've talked to about the same thing on here - is that after a major trauma (almost dying qualifies as major trauma/PTSD) is that the brain/mind can compartmentalise the perceptual reality - the emotional responses, the inability to deal with the reality, beliefs. etc. That can be where the voices come from and many who have suffered childhood traumas have said that their voices are children's voices. It's as though the person has taken a 'snapshot' of their mental/emotional state that has been frozen in time and the mind perceives it as a 'being' in its own right. The voice(s) usually seem to reflect that, as if what the voices say would come from a 'being' in that state of mind.

The reason I mentioned that was because you said you'd almost died due to COVID. I'd suggest that unless you've dealt with your experience of that directly, it's likely that you still haven't really got over it. Pushing it to the back of your mind isn't dealing with it or resolving it. I thought I'd dealt with my childhood abuse but a couple of rounds of therapy after a car accident that I shouldn't have walked away with showed me something different.

Our reality is all about how what's rattling in our skulls perceive it to be, and schizophrenia can be something of a unique perspective. However, on saying that schizophrenia and Spirituality light up the same areas of the brain. Most people don't want to admit to having a mental health issue and that in itself can be a mental health issue itself. How I love irony. But having a mental health issue is certainly a window into how we create our realities that few see or want to see.