- Hi, everyone. In today's video, I'm
going to be talking about what my experience of
hallucinations have been like. (light music) Welcome back to the Living Well
With Schizophrenia channel. My name is Lauren and I live
with schizoaffective disorder and I make videos about
what it's like to live with a schizophrenia spectrum illness. If you'd like to see
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all of our current patrons. We absolutely could not
be doing this without you. Thank you. Okay, so what has my experience with hallucinations been like? I guess, first and foremost, it's important to define
what exactly I mean when I say hallucinations. So hallucinations are a perception, be it visual, auditory,
olfactory, tactile, or taste of something that is not actually there. So you're perceiving a
stimuli or a stimulus that is not actually real
or not actually happening. And so this can be a
little bit disorienting at times, obviously, if
you are seeing or hearing or tasting or feeling or smelling things that aren't actually there, or that people around you
aren't also experiencing. So I think my first
experiences that I'm aware of that I had with
hallucinations were olfactory or the sense of smell. I would smell these
really terrible smells. I don't know how to describe it. It smelled something kind
of like a combination between body odor and old trash
that needs to be taken out. It was just really atrocious smells but I couldn't identify
what exactly it was and I also couldn't identify
where it was coming from. I was late adolescent, early
adulthood, very self-conscious and so I would just assume that
it was me who smelled awful. And so I would kind of withdraw
and hide from other people or hide from social situations for this simple fact
that I thought I reek. It's clear here how hallucinations, especially as they progress
in magnitude and in severity, can really impact a
person's ability to function and to integrate within society. The only person I really felt comfortable to kind of reality check
with about this awful smell was my boyfriend at the time. And I would be like,
"Do I smell really bad?" And I would have him like sniff my armpits just to make sure. And he was like, "No, you smell fine." And I didn't really believe him. I thought he was just being nice because it was so in my head
that I smelled terrible. And if I didn't smell, what was it? Everyone claimed they
couldn't smell this smell. And so it was confusing as
to what I was experiencing. My hallucination experiences
then kind of progressed into auditory hallucinations as well. And it kind of began
with just hearing my name in crowded places. And I would check around and
make sure no one had called it and it didn't seem like
anyone had called it. And then I would start to experience that when I was completely alone. And so then kind of
began to understand that, "Okay, this is probably in my head because there's no way, there's no one around me who
could have just said my name." This progressed further as my illness became
more prominent, I guess, into hearing actual conversations or mundane chit chat or
chatter going on in my head. And I think it's important
to kind of convey that this is different than
someone's internal dialogue. I often get asked that like, "How can you tell the difference between hearing voices or hearing your own internal dialogue?" And it is very different. When you are hearing voices or when you're having
auditory hallucinations, you can identify that it
is not coming from you. A lot of my hallucinations,
auditory hallucinations sound like they're coming
from outside of my head, but they do sometimes also
sound like they're coming from inside my head, but I can make the differentiation that they are different
than my own internal voice or internal monologue, and that they are coming from
some sort of external source. Before I was treated
for the correct illness and before I got proper treatment, I slid into psychosis where
my auditory hallucinations got really, really, really severe. And what I mean by this
is they got to a point where I was hearing auditory commands, command hallucinations, and generally, they were of
the nature of trying to get me to harm myself in some way. When you're first experiencing this, or when you're in a state where you can't really question it, it becomes very, very
difficult to live with that and to manage that in terms of having this
really overwhelming effect or influence on you that
it's very hard to ignore. And it's very hard to understand
where it's coming from. It's hard to break down
if these are your thoughts or if you're just being told them. And it's a very confusing
thing to experience. So that's kind of how
my hallucinations began. It was first the olfactory
and then the auditory, but then I started also getting more visual hallucinations as well. The main ways that this came about were I would see bugs
crawling around places where I would check with someone else and they didn't see any bugs. Or I remember one part of when was really
struggling with psychosis, I hallucinated spiders and I would have conversations with them. And so when I was in that,
experiencing that in the moment, I was quite detached from reality. And I didn't question having
a conversation with spiders or I didn't understand that that couldn't really be happening. It wasn't until after the fact,
when I looked back on that, and was like, whoa! (chuckles) That doesn't seem like it adds up. Now, I've been asked in terms
of visual hallucinations if what I see is really
realistic depictions, like if I hallucinate
realistic depictions of people and interact with them and whatnot, and this has only happened one time for me where I was really deep
in the throes of psychosis and I was kind of hiding in my car and I hallucinated this elderly man who was really realistic. I still kind of question if
it actually happened or not. But I hallucinated this elderly man who came and knocked on the window and tried to get in and whatnot. And upon talking with other people, I don't think that there's any way that that really could have happened, but it was so realistic
that I still kind of wonder. But that's the only time I've hallucinated that kind of realistic
human hallucination. For the most part, when
I see other people, it's more like in the shadows
or kind of shadowy figures and that's kind of what I hallucinate. However, I know there are people who do hallucinate other people as well. Also I think, along those lines of not hallucinating really realistic, tangible hallucinations, I think that my hallucinations
almost kind of feel like, especially when I look
back on them in hindsight, they almost kind of feel like, sometimes I don't act actually
see anything literally, but my mind is registering that there's something there that isn't. And so that's kind of a
weird form of hallucination that I experience sometimes too where I know that my
mind is just telling me that something is there and
that I'm interacting with that, but I don't really see
it, if that makes sense. Another way to maybe elaborate on this and another thing that I experience is just feeling a presence around me, some kind of presence where I feel that either some specific
entity or being is nearby or watching me or is in front of me. And, yeah, I guess that's
kind of a way to describe what I mean when I say
that my brain is telling me that there is something there
but I can't actually see it. So maybe it's like a six sense
sort of thing hallucination. Rob's telling me now that
that got a little bit into the, not astrology, but
the more spiritual realm. And I don't typically identify as someone who really
believes in all of that, but feeling a presence
is really the only way that I can think to describe what that type of hallucination
feels like for me. I've experienced some
tactile hallucinations but not very often. The only way that this kind of comes about is where I feel that I am
being touched on my arm or my back or wherever, but there's no one actually there or nothing there that's
actually touching me. And so that can be kind of alarming. That happens sometimes when
I'm trying to fall sleep and it's a little disturbing, but that's kind of the
extent of what I feel in terms of tactile hallucinations. And I don't really experience
taste hallucinations or not that I know of. I think what I'm tasting
tastes like what I'm tasting. I don't know. The only other kind of hallucination that I wanted to touch on
is more perception-based. And so what I mean by this is sometimes I will
look at a curtain, say, and the pattern on it
will seem to be shifting or doing things that I know
it couldn't possibly be doing. Like patterns will be moving
and they're inanimate objects so obviously, they're not moving. This perception thing also
comes into a play sometimes with my perception of people, where their face will start to look askew to the point where I
don't really recognize who I'm looking at, or where talking to someone, their face looks completely different from when I started talking to them. And this kind of perception shift is something that I struggle with a lot in terms of kind of a
hallucinatory experience. So I've kind of given a
mixture of the hallucinations that I experience when I am in psychosis, in severe psychosis, but also some of the
symptoms that I experience that are more breakthrough
everyday symptoms even while my schizophrenia
is being well managed. And I think it's important to understand that there is that kind
of spectrum, I guess, of severity of hallucinations, or I guess maybe disruption
of hallucinations, how much the hallucination
impacts your ability to still function and
to manage your illness. So I do still experience
breakthrough symptoms even though I'm on medication and overall my illness
is being well managed. All right, so thanks
for watching this video on my personal experiences
with hallucinations as a result of my
schizoaffective disorder. If you found this video
interesting or helpful, please get a thumbs up. And also if you want to see
more videos like this one, make sure to subscribe to our channel. Also just a quicker remind that
if you wanna help support us in creating these videos or if you want to join our
online peer support community to make sure to check out the link to our Patreon page in
the description below. Thank you so much for watching and as always, wishing you and
your loved ones good health. we'll see you in the next video. Bye.
