Medical Views on Hallucination

What is Hallucination?

Hallucinations are sensations that appear real but it is created by your mind. They can affect all five of your senses. For example, you might hear a voice call you that no one else in the room or you see an image that is not real.

Types of Hallucination:

Hallucinations affects your vision, sense of smell, hearing and sense of feel.

Optical Illusion causes hallucination

• Visual Hallucination

Visual hallucinations happens when you start to see things that aren't there. This type of hallucination include objects, visual patterns, people and or strange light. For example, a situation where you might see a person who is not in the room or seeing flashing lights that others could not see.

• Olfactory Hallucination

Olfactory hallucinations involves your sense of smell. You might smell an unpleasant odor when you are walking alone somewhere or you feel that your body smells bad when it does not. This type of hallucination includes the scents that you find enjoyable like the smell of flowers.

• Auditory Hallucination

Auditory hallucinations relates to your hearing sense where you might hear someone speaking to you or telling you to do something. This voice that you hear might be angry, threatening, neutral or even warm. Other examples found is when you hear footsteps of someone walking around but no one is there.

• Tactile Hallucination

Tactile hallucinations relates to the feeling of touch or movement on your body. For example, you might feel insects that you scare the most are crawling on your skin or on your shoulder. You might also felt that your internal organs are moving around in your body. In some situation, you might also feel the imagined touch of someone's hands on your body.

• Gustatory Hallucination

Gustatory hallucinations involves your sense of taste. For example, when you are drinking plain water, you felt the water tastes sour. But, the water that you drink is often tasteless. 

• Hypnagogic Hallucination

Hypnagogic hallucinations often related to your vivid dreamlike hallucination at the onset of sleep. These hallucination happens when you have a very vivid, intense dreams and nightmares while sleeping. Some dreams appear very lifelike that it is quite hard to tell if it is real or fake.

• Hypnopompic Hallucination

Hypnopompic hallucinations involves vivid dreamlike hallucination on awakening. These hallucination can be quite vivid and sometimes its frightening such as the sense of threatening stranger or creature in the room. Upon waking, it will take few minutes to wake up from the fear.

• Kinesthetic Hallucination

Kinesthetic hallucinations often relates to the sense of touch or physical experience. People may feel insects crawling over them or experience sudden pain. The sensation of crawling commonly associated with alcohol-related psychotic states.

• Lilliputian Hallucination

Lilliputian hallucinations are a form of hallucination where you tend see small figures of animals or people whom often depicted as happily dancing creatures.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the case studies of an alcohol dependent man (who was drinking about 50 units a day!) who suddenly cut-down on his drinking and started experiencing striking withdrawal effects as a result:

Following this, his sleep had markedly reduced and he started seeing little people all over the house. They were about a foot high, with funny colorful dresses, weird faces, big eyes and mouths. Some of them were also wearing spectacles. They would follow him all around the house and he could hear their footsteps. Patient would also see them drinking his blood (did not elaborate further) and complained of physical weakness as a result. Initially, patient attributed his experiences to some evil spirits present in the house and changed the house. But the experience continued.

Perhaps one of the most surprising causes of these hallucinations is muscular degeneration, sometimes diagnosed as Charles Bonnet syndrome, owing to the fact that simple damage to the retina can lead to complex hallucinations.

• Somatic Hallucination

Somatic hallucinations involves the perception of a physical experience occurring with the body. Feeling being touched, strangled or even feelings of sexual stimulation.

• Temporary Hallucination

Temporary hallucinations are not chronic. They may occur to those whom deeply in pain inside. For example: Assuming that you just lost your beloved one, you might hear the person's voice in your head and eventually it will disappear as the pain of your loss diminishes.

What causes Hallucination?

Mental illnesses are among the most common causes of hallucinations. Schizophrenia, dementia, and delirium are a few examples.

Substance abuse is another fairly common cause. Some people see or hear things that aren’t there after drinking too much alcohol or taking drugs like cocaine or PCP.

Lack of sleep can lead to hallucinations. If you have not slept in days or do not get enough sleep over long periods of time, you may be more prone to hallucinations.

Medications taken for certain mental and physical conditions can also cause hallucinations. Parkinson’s disease, depression, psychosis, and epilepsy medications may trigger hallucination symptoms.

Other conditions which could cause hallucinations include:

• terminal illnesses, such as AIDS, brain cancer, or kidney and liver failure
• high fevers, especially in children and the elderly
• migraines
• brain tumor
• delirium
• dementia
• severe fatigue
• severe infections
• stroke
• acute delirium
• social isolation, particularly in older adults
• seizures
• deafness, blindness, or vision problems
• epilepsy (in some cases, epileptic seizures can cause you to see flashing shapes or bright spots)

Does caffeine cause Hallucinations?

People who take caffeine equivalent of three cups of brewed coffee (or seven cups of instant coffee) more likely have tendency to hallucinate. Researchers found that people who take high amount of caffeine by drinking coffee, tea, chocolate or caffeinated energy drinks or pills; have three-times higher tendency to hear unknown voices and see things which are unreal. Though most people who drinks loads of coffee are not known to be hallucinating but they face problem in daily functioning; they are considered to be psychotic. Seven cups of instant coffee contains a total of 315 milligrams of caffeine. This amount can be replaced with six cups of strong tea, nine colas, four Red Bulls and about one and a half cups of coffee at boutique cafe.

Caffeine has wide range of effects in human body. Caffeine acts as central nervous system stimulant that temporarily wards off drowsiness and restores alertness. It is the world's most widely used drugs. Caffeine is absorbed by the stomach and the small intestine within 45 minutes of indigestion. It can be intoxicating, causes nervousness, irritability, anxiety, muscle twitching, insomnia, head aches and heart palpitations as shown in a research. Besides that, caffeine is also found to exacerbate the effects of stress. When an individual is under stress, the body releases a stress hormone called cortisol. It is a fact that more of this hormone is released in response to stress when people have recently took caffeine. This extra boost of cortisol may also link to the high intake of caffeine and increased tendency to hallucinate.

How are Hallucinations treated?

• General measures are; stress management, healthy living-style, regular exercise, reducing intake of caffeine and getting enough sleep.

• Prevent the use of illicit drugs such as cocaine, LSD, amphetamines and ecstacy. Reduce the consumption of alcohol.

• Attempt psycho social strategies to help to manage hallucination; counselling session is organized to help the patient and their family to cope with the hallucination. 

• Use anti psychotic medications to treat hallucinations include haloperidol, olanzapine and risperidone.

• If the hallucinations are caused by Parkinson's disease in a patient, the medication should be different than what is stated top.

Ways to cope with Hallucination:

Fighting back – This strategy of coping up involves talking back or yelling to hallucinations. Fighting back the voice is not a good idea because it may result to depression because the voice would not go away by itself.

Passive acceptance – Accepting hallucination has positive emotional effects, but in the long run passive acceptance can consume your entire life.

Mindfulness techniques - Acknowledging the voices can be agreeable, but accepting guidance from the voices should be spared of.

Distraction –  You can focus on tasks, watch television or recite numbers. Using distractions is more effective than the white noise.

Ask for help – People experiencing frequent hallucinations should ask help from family, friends and even support group. Going out with friends can divert the attention and make the mind busy.

Meditative activities – Exercising and engaging in other meditative activities like yoga can help prevent hallucinations. It is because this activity can calm your mind and body.