It's finally time to talk about

😢different types of hallucinations😭

First of all, hallucinations are not only visual,

we all know about auditory hallucinations, but there are others. For example, tactile sensations - when it seems that bugs are crawling under your skin, that's exactly from here. Feeling cold and heat out of nowhere can also be a hallucination - I met a girl who had something similar, in a psychiatric hospital.


Hallucinations can occur not only in schizophrenia.

There are many mental illnesses in which you can see all sorts of weird stuff - for example, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder - and other head games.


Also, people can see and feel things that aren't there even without having the happy ailments that ruin life. For instance, this can start after a head injury, or due to drug use, medications, or alcohol.

But generally, calling everything that isn't there but a person sees it a hallucination isn't quite correct.

Hallucinations are part of the clinical manifestations of "perceptual deception"

This includes

Illusions

Pseudo-hallucinations

True hallucinations

Illusions are a variant of normal,
this is when you see a cat in the shadows that isn't there, when after a scary story in the dark a chair seems like a monster, or any other visual trick. This is common - but this thing can intensify under strong emotional stress, as well as when using various substances.


Pseudo-hallucinations are what a person perceives as something that definitely isn't there, but! it exists in their head.
With pseudo-hallucinations, people understand that what they see is not something that exists, because they have a persistent feeling that this hallucination is inside their head. Pseudo-hallucinations do not interact with the outside world.


True hallucinations are what a person sees and accepts as part of the world.
Whatever they see, feel, or hear - it's part of their world, it integrates into it so that it's indistinguishable from reality. And a person encountering this for the first time may not even understand that they have a hallucination at all. They might see a demon - this relates to demonomanic hallucinations - and for them, it will be as real as a cup or a kettle on the stove. Even if there is no cup. Even if there is no kettle. And no stove either.
A person following their hallucination can do the wildest things. In Addiction, there is a character diagnosed with schizophrenia, we'll learn about him in the second volume.


But! With a certain level of awareness about hallucinations, experience with them - and also the behavior of other people greatly influences the perception of hallucinations - as well as with well-developed critical thinking, people can begin to recognize the hallucination and distinguish it from the world. It doesn't become a pseudo-hallucination because of this; it still blends into the world and becomes part of it, but with constant encounters with the same hallucination - which is often evidence of trauma - it can be distinguished, and accordingly, coped with. I read about a method of one girl with schizophrenia: when she suspected she was having a hallucination, she photographed what seemed strange to her. In the photo, the hallucination was not transferred, remaining in space.

I'll tell you something else about this later