Auditory hallucinations are a fairly common symptom in mentally ill people. Voices in your head can come up at any moment. For some, they go in the background all the time. Some people have it with a certain frequency of attacks. When auditory hallucinations occur, a person can hear various sounds, rustling clicks, the sound of footsteps, the dull sounds of a ball falling to the floor, a crying child, conversations and discussions that do not exist in reality.
Less commonly, auditory hallucinations are combined with visual hallucinations, when voices and pictures or visions appear in the head.
The nature of voices can be extremely different. The voice can be female or male, or it can be completely incomprehensible to a person. There may be several voices in your head. They can talk about their own, or they can discuss the patient. Discussions are also extremely varied.
What are auditory hallucinations?
The voices in your head can either praise you or scold you. Call obscene words. Sometimes whole dialogues can go on in your head. Voices can order, force, to do something. Often the patient is unable to resist their pressure, which can lead to socially dangerous acts. The voices in your head may order you to hurt yourself or hurt another person. The patient’s behavior becomes unpredictable. The voices that sound in a person’s head are perceived as real.
Due to the lack of understanding of the presence of a severe mental symptom in the form of voices in the head, the patient is unlikely to seek help from a doctor on his own.
Most often, auditory hallucinations occur in schizophrenia, as part of the paranoid syndrome. However, voices can be a manifestation of an organic disease of the brain, a tumor. When using certain groups of drugs, auditory hallucinations occur. With exhaustion of the nervous system, after a long load. Some medications can cause hallucinations as a side effect.
There are hallucinations that a person sees when a person falls asleep or, on the contrary, wakes up ( hypnogogic and hypnopompic ). Such hallucinations are usually considered normal. They occur against the background of severe depletion of the nervous system, or the use of psychoactive substances.
Diagnosis of vocal hallucinations
When diagnosing schizophrenia, otolaryngological diseases and diseases associated with CNS damage should be excluded, as well as the possible use of psychoactive substances should be excluded.
With timely and correctly identified hallucinations, you can quickly select the necessary effective therapy, thus saving a person from the disease.