It’s one thing to be told that schizophrenia often involves a person who hears or sees things that aren’t there. It’s another to ‘experience’ it yourself, via Second Life. (Although I’m not sure I’d call it ‘experiencing’ something by watching it on a screen, but I digress.) But a press release that came across our desk the other day did make it seem like this has some potential to help people with understanding a component of schizophrenia.
A University of California-Davis professor of psychiatry has helped develop an Internet-based virtual reality (VR) environment that simulates the hallucinations of people with schizophrenia. The vast majority of individuals who have toured the environment self-reported that it improved their understanding of the auditory and visual hallucinations experienced by people with schizophrenia.
“Using traditional educational methods, instructors have difficulty teaching about the internal phenomena of mental illnesses, such as hallucinations,” said Peter Yellowlees, professor of psychiatry and director of Academic Information Systems at UC Davis Health System.
Developed by Yellowlees and colleagues in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, the virtual reality system is being used as a teaching tool at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Yellowlees and his team created the virtual environment to replicate the experiences and world of a schizophrenia patient to provide medical students with a better understanding of this mental illness.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects 1 percent of the population. Most people with schizophrenia experience auditory hallucinations, particularly hearing voices, and about one-fourth of those with the disorder experience visual hallucinations.
The researchers took photographs of an inpatient ward and hospital furnishings at UC Davis Medical Center to create their virtual setting. The team constructed simulations of auditory and visual hallucinations based on recorded audio samples and digital images described in interviews with schizophrenia patients. The researchers inserted the hallucinations as individual objects that would appear automatically throughout the ward, triggered by the presence of an avatar, an electronic image represented and manipulated by a computer user.
The hallucinations in the virtual environment included:
- Multiple voices, occasionally overlapping, criticizing the user
- A poster that would change its text to obscenities
- A newspaper in which the word “death” would stand out in a headline
- A floor that would fall away, leaving the user walking on stepping stones above a bank of clouds
- Books on bookshelves with titles related to fascism
- A television that would play a political speech, but then criticize the user and encourage suicide
- A gun that would appear under a cone of light and pulse, with associated voices telling the user to take the gun and commit suicide
- A mirror in which a person’s reflection would appear to die, becoming gaunt with bleeding eyes
Over a two-month period, the virtual psychosis environment was toured 836 times and received 579 valid survey responses. Large majorities of the responders said the tour improved their understanding of auditory hallucinations (76 percent), visual hallucinations (69 percent) and schizophrenia (73 percent). Eighty-two percent said they would recommend the tour to others.
One user said, “That tour was amazing. I didn’t think it would affect me, but about halfway through, I wanted to shout, ‘Stop it!'”
Another user said, “My first husband was schizophrenic. I have experienced visual hallucinations and they are disturbing enough.”
Yelllowlees and his colleagues acknowledged some important limitations of their pilot project, including their survey population not being a representative sample of the general population. Also, because users did not take a pre-test, the researchers cannot prove that participants improved their knowledge. Lastly, because the virtual environment focuses only on hallucinations, it may give inappropriate weight to these symptoms, rather than a fuller view including other symptoms such as delusions, and disordered speech and behavior.
However, despite those limitations, Yellowlees and his team believe their approach is promising. They plan to perform a more formal evaluation of its effectiveness in teaching students about psychotic experiences as compared to traditional teaching approaches. In addition, they intend to use the virtual environment to teach caregivers attending an early intervention program for patients experiencing a first episode of psychosis.
You can visit the Virtual Hallucinations website to learn more about how to view them yourself (requires Second Life software and a Second Life account, address: secondlife://sedig/26/45/).
13 comments
I’d like your professional opinion on two recent interviews I had with Sigmund Freud (published on my blog – “Necessary Therapy”)
i went through this tour and i have to say, it threw me into a paranoia for the past day.
really intense.
I’m not schizophrenic, but I have visually hallucinated a handful of times as a side effect to one of my heart medications. Its really freaky! The first time it happened, I had clean laundry drying on a rack and my socks suddenly started to dance and jump around! I was so scared!–yet in a way, almost entertained–but fear was way over tops. I wish telling it to “Stop” or “Go away” would actually work. The experience is very freaky, scary, annoying. I am glad its only an occasional side effect and of medication that I take only as needed, not every day. I can’t imagine what it could be like for someone who experiences hallucinations every day. I had a friend who was bipolar and he hallucinated often. He tried to hide how much it bothered him. I am grateful for having the experience as well to understand what is like.
I am not taking meds like u are but I can tell u, the dead squirrel waving at me in the tree was very real to me. I also had music repeat over and over, sometimes for 5 straight days. Once “radioactive” was going on for 7 days. It stopped being funny abt 6 months in.I hear conversations involving groups of people, but not loud enough to make out words. Im trying to get help and involve my friends and family without them throwing me in 72hr psych hold. Lol. Your not alone and I hope things have gotten better
I guess people used to take drugs (e.g., LSD) in order to understand. Nowdays you just have to throw… How much money? Into coming up with a computer program.
imagine being a thirteen or fouteen your old kid and having someone do that to with a radio wave and them messing with you about anything that happened in your life from break ups with girlfriends to fights with your parents … then take a look at the school shootings in the united states, such as ralph tortoricci in albany new york, and ask yourself with all the current state of the art technology why hasnt any one in the justice department investigated the claims of some of these kids and checked out who has access to some of the alen frey general electric scientist technology concerning voice to skull communications and tried to do something to at least verify why all these kids in america are claiming just what you did in the avatar world is happening to them in real life daren george tacoma washington
I am a paranoid schizophrenic. I have and have had visual hallucinations. They’re virtually indistinguishable from reality (reality being during the times that I’m NOT hallucinating). These things are hard to understand and are NOT always without consequences.
What is it called when an actual odor causes a visual hallucination? It seldom happens to me but when it does it is caused by someone near me passing very bad gas. It can, at times, cause me to see flashes of a kind of “textured field” in my vision. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Synesthesia.
My friend says people are listening to her phone conversations, she has stopped talking to us in detail on phone, their is a group of people who knows everything private happening inside her house, people at work chat behind her back that how bad she is, sometimes how good she is with kids or something else. Also said, people knows what she is thinking. She performs every day activities perfectly fine, dresses appropriately, beautifully, and gracefully, and up to the occasion; keeps the house clean. I find her easily getting upset on things she doesn’t like, not having patience to listen other people’s ideas/thoughts, passing disrespectful or demeaning comments to people who talks to her. But she is very emotional, always ready to help, very good with kids, pleasant to talk to when she is not in stress.
She believes her thoughts (someone is listening her phones) so deeply and tightly that her family and we friends try to give logic that her thinking is wrong but she doesn’t believe and says “you don’t know anything, scientists have invented things that while sitting far off places you can hear/see things in someone’s houses. I told my friend to capture all the images you need energy source, some kind of wire and a very small camera fitted somewhere in your house…when she can’t find an answer either she shouts or start accusing the talker about something totally unrelated like how stupid they are, how unkind and thoughtless they are and how she would have blindly trusted and helped someone if they had told her. Please help, is our friend making this all up, if not how can we help?
In my past when I was a little girl in elementary because my home had a huge problem with roaches, some days they would end up hitching a ride to school with me and when they would pop out to say hello the kids would scream, jump out their seats and then after talk about the fact I brought a roach to school the whole week. After those times I made it my business to check my backpack literally every single day. Even after moving away to a brand new house Its like I still had the feeling that one could be hiding around waiting to go to school with me and those screams and the teasing would come back. Now I am older and for some reasons its like I see roaches that aren’t really there around me or flashing pass me at the corner of my eye. I would check around me and empty out my backpack but I would find nothing. The worst part about this is at times at the thought of roaches I would feel as if they are crawling all over and I would start itching. Is there a name for this feeling? Would anyone consider what I am going through as hallucinating?
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years ago and spent a few months in the hospital. I guess I do have schizophrenia, but it usually doesn’t bother me. I guess I’m pretty high functioning and have had mostly positive symptoms. It’s the intrusive thoughts I get (and attribute sometimes to my own ticcy brain, and sometimes to spirits) that are my main complaint. I see most of my symptoms through the lens of spirituality – so I would say I have beliefs of reference rather than delusions of reference, for example. I won’t talk about that much as I try to keep my spiritual beliefs to myself.
My experience of visual and auditory hallucinations are different from many of the descriptions I have read online. I used to hear voices in background noises. They were not “critical” at first. Actually they were a form of companionship, but later became kind of poltergeisty. I stopped tuning in to them and now I don’t hear voices anymore.
For awhile I would hear music in my head – music I had never heard before. And I have had some pretty weird visions. The visions have a unique character and are like dreams except you have them when you are awake.
Just figured I’d share some of my experiences. The description of the VR thing wasn’t really consistent with my own experiences of being schizophrenic.
There is more than one type of schizophrenia, and some people without schizophrenia can hallucinate or have delusions (for e.g. schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, etc).
Anyway, your comment reminded me of a YouTuber named Brie Kelly. She is a diagnozed schizophrenic, by her own admission. However, she has convinced herself that the voices, shadows and general ‘presences’ she sees and feels are spiritual.
Every home she’s ever lived in has had spirits that talk to her. She thinks she is ‘connected’, and is a medium. She also has other delusions, such as believing someone hacked her YouTube channel, and deleted all of her content (which coincided with a recent breakdown she had, which leads me to believe SHE did it, but perhaps dissociated and didn’t remember).
Beliefs are beliefs of course, I am not trying to “convince you otherwise”, as it were. It just reminded me very much of this other girl.