Hallucinations
may be a symptom of mental illness, but do not always mean that the person is ill. Hallucinations are actually relatively common. A 2020 study in Europe found that 7.3% of people hear voices. Scientists from South Africa concluded that this figure is 12.7%. Scientists do not fully understand why some people hallucinate and others do not. Researchers also don't know what causes hallucinations in people with conditions such as schizophrenia.
Types of hallucinations
Hallucinations can occur any time there is a change in brain activity. For example, some people are more vulnerable to hallucinations when they are falling asleep or partially awake.
A 2020 study of mice that took a hallucinogenic drug found that the animals had less activity in areas of the brain that scientists associate with incoming visual information. This observation suggests that hallucination may be the brain's way of compensating for a drop in sensory input.
There are many different types of hallucinations, including:
- Auditory hallucinations
: This is when a person hears sounds that are not there, such as a voice or radio. - Visual hallucinations
: a person sees something unreal, such as a person or animal. - Olfactory hallucinations
: can occur when a person smells something that is not there. - Taste hallucinations
: causing the taste of something that the person has not eaten. - Tactile hallucinations
: Occur when a person feels something or someone touch them. - Somatic hallucinations
: Can affect the entire body, causing unreal sensations such as insects crawling under the skin.
What to do?
So, we figured out where the “glitches” come from. Now let’s talk about what to do if a similar problem affects you or your relatives.
With children and old people everything is quite simple. In the first case, you need to measure the temperature and ask what the child drank or ate over the past couple of hours. At the same time, you need to call an ambulance. Algorithm for contacting medical specialties - infectious disease specialist, neurologist, psychiatrist. In the case of a person of more advanced age, hallucinations almost never occur spontaneously - they are preceded either by neurological problems or periods of confused consciousness with disorientation. Relatives of an old man can observe for years how his mental activity is gradually upset, and most often turn to doctors long before hallucinations occur. If the deceptions of perception occur suddenly, without any background, you must immediately call an ambulance - this could be the debut of a mental illness or even an acute stroke.
For people aged 20 to 60 years, almost all the reasons mentioned above are relevant. The first step is to ask the patient. If he makes contact and is trusting in communication, then the reason will most likely be outside the drug addiction or psychiatric plane. Otherwise, the patient will either hide the presence of hallucinations, or, due to the lack of critical comprehension, will consider imaginary images to be part of the real world.
Pay attention to the patient's behavior. If he is anxious, looks around all the time, looks closely at something, or gets scared, these could be hallucinations. You can check your guess using tests for hidden hallucinations. Give the patient a blank sheet of paper and ask what is written on it. Or pretend to hold something small with your thumb and forefinger and ask the patient what it is. If a pathological process that causes hallucinations is in full swing, then the patient’s brain will “read” a blank sheet or come up with what exactly you are holding with your fingers.
Regardless of the identified cause, if these are not elementary, hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, you should immediately call an ambulance. The information you collect during the survey will help doctors quickly determine the cause of the perceptual disorder.
Hallucinations - reasons
Numerous medical conditions and other factors can cause hallucinations. In a 2010 study, researchers tried to study many of these hallucinations and their causes. They include:
Drugs
Drugs called hallucinogens can cause hallucinations. These drugs temporarily change the way the brain processes and transmits information, causing unusual experiences and thoughts. LSD, salvia, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and some mushrooms are common hallucinogens.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental health condition that changes the way a person thinks and behaves. Hallucinations can also cause psychosis, which is a loss of contact with reality. People with psychosis may experience delusions and hallucinations and exhibit behavior that is not typical. Antipsychotic medications may help manage symptoms.
Postpartum mental disorders
Many women suffer from postpartum depression and anxiety. Less commonly, some experience postpartum psychosis, which can cause hallucinations. For example, a mother believes that she hears her child crying when he is sleeping at this time. In more extreme cases, a mother may hear a voice telling her to kill her child.
Because postpartum psychosis can put the baby at risk, prompt treatment is vital. Therapy, medications and social support can help.
Anxiety and depression
People with anxiety and depression may experience occasional hallucinations. Hallucinations are usually very brief and are often associated with specific emotions that the person is experiencing. For example, a depressed person may hear someone tell them that they are worthless. Treatment of the underlying disorder can often eliminate hallucinations.
Alcohol withdrawal
Abrupt withdrawal from alcohol can cause hallucinations, especially in people who are experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms called delirium tremens. A person with delirium tremens may also vomit or shake. Symptoms usually disappear after a few days.
Forecast
Chronic visions caused by schizophrenia or other mental illnesses can usually be controlled with medication. If the visions do not disappear, the patient should be taught the correct attitude towards them. Disorders associated with lack of sleep or severe stress cease after the cause is eliminated.
Thank you
The site provides reference information for informational purposes only. Diagnosis and treatment of diseases must be carried out under the supervision of a specialist. All drugs have contraindications. Consultation with a specialist is required!
Illusions
– this is an inadequate perception of actually existing objects and events. In very young children, illusions are a variant of the physiological norm, since it is in this way that fantasy and some other functions of thinking are formed. Young children are not critical of what they come up with; they perceive reality through the prism of their fantasies and inventions. In this regard, a child with a fine nervous organization often has physiological illusions. These illusions can be quite unpleasant when they are combined with anxiety or fearfulness.
Hallucinations
- these are spontaneously appearing, very colorful types of objects, events that do not really exist. Hallucinations in children are a sign of psychosis. However, they are absent in neuroses. In children, both illusions and hallucinations are characteristic of psychoses caused by intoxication of the body or infection, with high body temperature, in moments of clouding of consciousness, with schizophrenia. In children, such hallucinations are most often unclear in form and content and may vary.
According to data obtained by Dutch scientists, ten percent of schoolchildren in the first and second grades suffer from auditory hallucinations from time to time. Fifteen percent of all are interfered with by these phenomena. The rest calmly tolerate the presence of “voices”; it does not bother them.
Nineteen percent of respondents said that such phenomena interfere with thinking. At the same time, hallucinations occur equally often in children of both sexes. But the girls felt anxious and afraid. Surprisingly, the appearance of hallucinations is more common among children living in villages. But urban children experience more severe violations.
According to other surveys, about sixteen percent of completely healthy adolescents and children suffer from auditory hallucinations from time to time.
According to scientists, this phenomenon gradually disappears without special treatment. But, according to other scientists, the presence of “voices” may indicate a child’s predisposition to certain mental illnesses. Before use, you should consult a specialist.
Reviews
Children never deceive or invent, they have an open perception! They have not yet entered our illusory, unreal, advertising, money-based, artificial WORLD! You yourself overcame the fear of the dark.....or you just forgot something one day, switched your attention, your parents convinced you) you can’t forget fears, you have to overcome them yourself, face a childhood nightmare face to face, I’m afraid you’re the only one helpless, turn to God, for strength to illuminate the darkness, otherwise one day it will be too late………..
The kids are all creative, just hang in there. My son is only three years old, and he’s already making up such stories that mom, don’t worry. And I can imagine what he will come up with in another two years. Therefore, if the child is mentally healthy, develops normally and everything is fine with him, then these hallucinations and inventions are nonsense. It's bad if fears begin. It's harder to fight fears. Mine, sometimes, begins to be afraid of all sorts of nonsense. Or maybe he's making this up too? I don't understand often.
Illusions
- erroneous perception of actually existing objects and phenomena of reality. In young children, illusions can be physiological, which is associated with the characteristics of the child’s imagination. A young child is characterized by a lack of criticism of the products of the imagination and a tendency toward an imaginative, fantastic perception of the surrounding reality. Therefore, an impressionable, easily excitable child may experience so-called physiological illusions. However, the combination of these illusions with fear takes on the character of painful phenomena.
Hallucinations
- involuntarily arising, vivid, sensory images of objects and phenomena that are objectively absent in the perceived environment. Hallucinations are a typical symptom of psychosis and are not observed in neuroses. In children, hallucinations and illusions most often occur during infectious and intoxication psychoses, at the height of febrile states, during periods of fluctuations in clarity of consciousness, as well as in schizophrenia. In young children they are characterized by uncertainty, lack of delineation, and inconstancy.
Emotional (affective) disorders
. Features of emotions children of the first 3 years of life determine the structure of emotional disorders at this age stage. The transient reactions of protest, refusal, various forms of negativism, tearfulness, irritability, and whims that arise in the 3rd year of life should not be regarded as pathological emotional disorders. Occurring sporadically and without disturbing the child’s contact with the surrounding reality, they are physiological in nature and associated with the age phase of the child’s development.
One of the most common symptoms of mood disorders
In young children there is night terror. The most typical occurrence of night terror is during the first age crisis (2-4 years). It manifests itself as a state of acute excitement, accompanied by screaming, crying, and vegetative reactions. The child is restless, has an expression of horror and fear on his face, he screams and often wakes up. The content of night fears in young children is usually little differentiated and more often comes from the plot of stories and fairy tales of others. A symptom of night terror can be a manifestation of a neurotic state in an impressionable, easily excitable child, as well as the initial manifestation of a mental (schizophrenia) or neurological (epilepsy) disease.
Features of fears in children
is their tendency to generalize and relapse. The duration of night fears, the absence of complete awakening, the spread of night fears into the daytime, the gradual complication of their content, the presence of vegetative reactions (diffuse redness or pallor, sweating, rapid heartbeat, respiratory distress), as well as an obsessive nature, are unfavorable for the prognosis.
Along with typical night terrors
Young children often have a fear of loneliness (the child is afraid to be alone) and a fear of the dark. They can also be observed in healthy but impressionable children; they often occur with congenital nervousness, as well as along with other symptoms characteristic of mental illness.
Emotional lability
is a common symptom of affective disorders in young children. Emotional lability manifests itself in instability of mood with an unexpected easy transition from high to low - from laughter to tears and vice versa. The mood changes quickly, spasmodically and without external reason. Emotional lability is characteristic of cerebrasthenic conditions in children with damage to the central nervous system, and is also observed after somatic and infectious diseases.
With organic brain damage, epileptiform syndrome
states of a melancholy-irritable nature with anger, indignation, and aggressiveness may develop. They often occur in paroxysms and are called dysphoria. In some cases, children experience complete indifference, indifference, and indifference. They are passive and spend most of their time in bed. This condition is called apathetic-abulic syndrome. It occurs most often with damage to the frontal-limbic parts of the brain, and is observed in children with cerebral palsy, in some forms of oligophrenia and other diseases.
Dementia and other brain disorders
Dementia gradually damages the brain, including areas associated with sensory processing. People with mid- to late-stage dementia may experience auditory and visual hallucinations. They see people who have died. In other cases, their hallucinations can be terrifying and cause feelings of paranoia and panic. Medicines can relieve these symptoms.
Convulsions
Sometimes hallucinations are a symptom of a seizure disorder. A person may experience hallucinations during or after a seizure. In most cases, treatment for seizures prevents hallucinations.
Migraine
Some people with migraines experience hallucinations during or just before a migraine. These hallucinations are often visual. The person may see spots and colors that are not there, or other unusual images.
Insomnia
Some people experience hallucinations, which doctors associate with sleep disturbances. Hallucinations usually occur when a person is falling asleep or waking up. In some cases, the hallucination occurs with an episode of sleep paralysis, when the person wakes up and is temporarily unable to move. Treating sleep disorders may relieve symptoms. In some cases, knowing that hallucinations occur due to changes in the brain during the sleep cycle can make them less frightening.
Sensory diseases
People with hearing or vision loss may experience hallucinations. This may be due to brain changes in sensory processing areas or in the visual or auditory information the brain receives.
Other reasons
In some cases, hallucinations may not be related to illness or medications. Sometimes suggestive forces cause hallucination. For example, in religious traditions where the voice of God is often heard, a person may report an auditory hallucination. A person sleeping in a house that they believe is haunted may hear noises or see ghostly figures due to increased anxiety.
Treatment
In adolescents and children, hallucinations are treated with medications. In the case of conditions associated with overfatigue, where proper rest relieves the disorder, it is also prescribed for sedative purposes to help calm the nervous system and relax.
To relieve agitation caused by hallucinatory experiences, combinations of an antipsychotic with a tranquilizer are used, and vital signs are monitored without fail. When, under the influence of hallucinations, excitement becomes uncontrollable, for the safety of others and the patient himself, it is necessary to restrict the patient’s movement; it is enough to lay him on the bed and cover him with a blanket up to his shoulders, tucking the ends under the mattress.
Conclusion
It should be remembered that hallucinatory arousal is a condition that threatens not only physical health in the event of harm to oneself or others, but also somatic health, because if health deteriorates, a patient who is in impaired consciousness may not complain.
Before looking for the names of pills for hallucinations for a teenager, you need to determine the reason that caused them. This is not the case when you can rely on folk remedies. What is important here is timeliness and adequate medical monitoring of compliance with doctor’s orders. If a teenager is suspected of using psychoactive substances, a consultation with a psychiatrist will be required, and the sooner, the better the prognosis.
Hallucinations and delusions
A hallucination is not a delusional idea, although the two are closely related. A delusion is a false belief, and a hallucination is a false perception. Many people may have fallen for optical illusions and other mental tricks. However, a hallucination is more than an error in perception. People who hallucinate see or hear things that aren't really there. They may also believe their hallucinations are real or attach special meanings and false beliefs to them. These attached false beliefs are delusions.
Other symptoms of hallucinations
Hallucinations often signal a fundamental problem with the way the brain processes information, for example when a person with dementia develops hallucinations or depression causes psychosis.
Some other symptoms that a person may experience with hallucinations include:
- changes in brain function as people age
- unusual beliefs
- depression or anxiety
- vision or hearing problems
- paranoid or aggressive behavior
- belief in conspiracies
- seizures
- headache
When to see a doctor
It is wise to see a doctor after any hallucination, even if there are no other symptoms. It is especially important to seek medical help if a person experiences changes in mood or behavior in addition to hallucinations.
Not all hallucinations require treatment, especially if the hallucination is a single event. A hallucination is not a medical emergency, but only a doctor can determine whether it signals a serious health problem.
Scientific article on the topic: The tendency to auditory hallucinations can be identified in early childhood
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