The Montreal Gazette writes about a new, fascinating technique for treating schizophrenic hallucinations — virtual reality.
Basically, a patient will tell a researcher what their hallucination looks and sounds like, and the researcher will create a virtual reality, avatar doppleganger.
So if a patient sees a horrifying image and hears scary words, the researcher will try to recreate that image and words.
Once the avatar is created, the patient — when not hallucinating — will learn how to talk back to the avatar and cultivate greater awareness of how the avatar is attacking him.
Initial results are encouraging for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is funding a six year study, comparing this particular method with CBT (a recent study, I should note, suggests CBT isn’t helpful for schizophrenia).
It’s important to note that medications are still more effective at treating hallucinations and voices, leading to complete remission in many cases. But some patients can’t tolerate the medicine.
The Gazette’s story is anchored by a compelling story from a patient who’s had to deal with it.
They popped up out of nowhere, telling Richard Breton how he was nothing, nothing but a bad father, a nasty husband, and had no friends because he was disgusting.
For 30 years the debilitating voices and hallucinations came 15 times a day. His head reverberated with voices shouting the worst scenarios: “The car driving down the road is going to swerve on the sidewalk and smash into you. A bomb will explode, or someone armed with a gun is going to shoot everyone,” he recalled.
Breton, 53, said he’d have done anything to make the demon voices leave him alone. Anything, that is, except increase the anti-psychotic medication prescribed for schizophrenia because the side effects were insufferable. He couldn’t work. It robbed him of energy, motivation and libido. He could barely manage to eat and wash himself, and he trembled, spending the better part of each day in a zombie-like, drug-induced daze.
But today that period of Breton’s life is long over. Breton has returned to school and has been working for two years, and he’s remarried. Also, his doctors reduced the antipsychotic medication to a minimum. Breton says his turnaround is not due to any wonder drug but to a new treatment that fights hallucinations with hallucinations.”=
Me, here.
My heart, and the heart of every Christian, should go out to those afflicted by this disease.
There are still huge swaths of the church that would misinterpret these types of symptoms as “demonic” when, in reality, they can mostly be explained by auditory processing problems in the brain — basically, you are hearing your own voice when you hear “other voices” and the terrible things they’re telling you about yourself? That’s actually your own voice and negativity, but because of the auditory processing problems, you interpret them as someone else’s.
Here’s more on that:
Essentially, the brains of hallucinating patients acted as though they were experiencing a “real” auditory experience. Their brains were generating the “voices or sounds” and they were “hearing” the sounds at the same time! Somehow the patients never made the connection that they were hearing their own voice. The patients believed that the voices were coming from someone else.
…..The actual problem, for the psychology majors in the audience, which was discovered, was an anatomical error within the fiber bundle that connects speech-generating areas in the frontal lobe with auditory cortex in the temporoparietal lobe. Essentially, if you do not know with certainty that you are speaking then you will assume that the voices are talking TO you. Sadly, and sometimes tragically, due to the underlying paranoia that these patients also experience, the voices instruct the patients to do disagreeable tasks.
Imagine the heartbreak of Christians living with schizophrenia who are told that they must “rebuke the devil” to get rid of the voices, or counter this disease with Scripture, when in reality, medical treatment can bring these awful symptoms into remission.
