Hallucinations - Content (1)

Dr. Sukhi Shergill examines whether the content of hallucinations is important.

The content of hallucinations is important because that’s what the person’s believing at the time. Because it’s actually their inner speech, they’re generating their own thoughts, what they actually hear is their own thoughts. Now what’s surprising about it is that most of the time in patients with schizophrenia is that they tend to hear unpleasant things. And it’s difficult to believe that most people’s own thoughts are saying bad things about them. So somehow the patient with schizophrenia, the normal kind of thinking about what to eat, what you might be planning to do, where you might be moving your hands, seems to become foreign to them and they experience it as someone else’s voice. Not only that but it also picks up the intonation and the character of those voices, and the content can often be very unpleasant.