Hallucinations
Articles that touch on hallucinations caused by psychosis
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Suppressed Feelings and Psychosis
My doctor once told me that I experience my feelings visually. By this, she meant the visual hallucinations I was experiencing at the time were manifestations of the feelings that I was either suppressing or struggling to resolve. But it’s not just visual hallucinations. For several weeks I’ve been experiencing recurring auditory hallucinations. During therapy my doctor again pointed out that these hallucinations are my feelings come to life. It’s not always obvious what they mean though. And there are some for which I have no explanation. Or maybe there’s an explanation and I just have yet to find it. There are others with psychosis who use the meanings behind…
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The Trauma of Experiencing Mental Illness
Trauma is often a trigger for mental illness, but experiences had due to mental illness can also be traumatic themselves. I’ve had near death or serious injury experiences. I’ve been threatened, manipulated, and emotionally abused by an ex-boyfriend. I’m a rape survivor with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While my PTSD is triggered by things that remind me of my traumas, I’ve also discovered that I have a similar response to fears about experiencing symptoms and actions related to my schizoaffective disorder. For much of my life, I have battled depression At certain points in time, beginning at a very early age, I would think about suicide. Sometimes it was just…
- Adapting to life with schizoaffective disorder, Cognitive Symptoms, Disorganized symptoms, Hallucinations, Negative Symptoms, Recovery, Schizoaffective Disorder, Schizophrenia
Adapting to life with schizoaffective disorder (part 3) – symptoms
I didn’t know what to expect. Deep down I had suspected that it was schizophrenia, but getting confirmation from my doctor made it real. I was scared. None of the stories I knew about schizophrenia ended with someone being symptom-free. I sat in the car after my doctor’s appointment with my head spinning. Were the hallucinations going to get worse? Was I going to become delusional? Would I largely lose touch with reality? At that moment, I decided that that was not going to happen to me. It was more denial than anything else, but I had my mind set on it. I was not going to lose my life…
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Auditory Hallucinations – A Closer Look
We talked about visual hallucinations in Visual Hallucinations – A Closer Look, so now it’s time to dig into auditory hallucinations. One summer day in 2008, I was getting ready for the day. I was home alone with no music or TV. From the back corner of my bedroom behind me, I heard a snicker. It was short, but crystal clear. A man’s voice. Laughing at me. Days passed, and then I heard the sound of a guitar being strummed just once. I began to hear all sorts of other strange sounds, like the creaking of floorboards under carpet at night. I could hear each slow but purposeful footfall, as…
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Reality Checking
During a question and answer session after myself and another speaker shared our stories to educate sheriff officers during Crisis Intervention Training, one of the officers brought up that he has a friend with schizophrenia and his friend will sometimes ask him if he heard or saw something, which is a tool many of us refer to as reality checking. The officer continued, saying he was usually able to confirm the experience as real, but then he asked, “what do I do if it isn’t real?” I cannot stress enough how important this question is, and I have the feeling this is a question many people have, and may or…
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Visual Hallucinations – A Closer Look
The picture above depicts a fluffy grey cat crouching on the branch of a tree, horizontal to the camera. Kind of Cheshire-cat-like. The cat’s tail hangs off the branch. She’s a little hazy, but she’s not a ghost; she’s very much there. Her eyes are pale, but confident and reassuring. You don’t see her do you? I don’t see her there anymore either, though I can see exactly where she was and I can picture her in my head. I took this photo during my worst episode to date. It was my senior year of college, and my mind pulled out all the stops. I had symptoms that I had…